Trying to export. Error: Database or object is read-only.

[ddiamond]

Trying to export an access query to MS-Excel

Error: Database or object is read-only.

This error message is mis-leading. It has nothing to do with read-only files or lack of permissions. This error message occurs on some computers when the export path + filename exceeds either 64 or 128 characters. It only affects about 10% of our users, however. Most of them can exceed 128 characters without a problem. This does not appear to be an OS limitation (Win 2000), so I assume it is an Access 97 problem. Since it only affects some of our users, I assume there is a setting somewhere that controls this. Does anyone know if Access 97 has such a setting?

 

[VBslammer]

See if this KB addresses your issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304146

VBSlammer

"You just have to know which screws to turn." - Professor Bob

 

[VBslammer]

I had a similar problem several years ago (Access 97) when a company switched from NT to Novell for their network servers, and we had to convert our long filenames to short filenames to fix the problem.

Any file path that would be the same as either a long or short filename worked fine, so it took us a while to figure out why it worked sometimes and not others.

VBSlammer

"You just have to know which screws to turn." - Professor Bob

 

[ddiamond]

Thanks VBSlammer for the tip. Although I'm getting the same error message as described in

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304146,

I think the underlying cause is different. The article mentions quotation marks and vbcrlf as the culprit, but we don't have that problem. In our case it seems to be tied to filename length.