Josh,
I have found that if you save a shared workbook, and at that exact moment
another user is actively in the process of reading from or writing to the
file, you will get messages of this nature. From watching the network
folder where the file resides while this is going on, it looks like this
what happens:
o Excel locks the original copy of the shared file.
o Excel writes the updated version to a temporary file, which has a
randomly generated name and no filename extension.
o Excel deletes the original copy; and then renames the temporary copy
with the original file name.
While all of this is going on, Excel locks the old file. If someone else
tries to read from or write to the file during this interval, they get an
error message such as the one you mentioned. Since my file is fairly large
(about 48M), the process can take as much as a couple of minutes, depending
on how bogged down the network is and how old and slow the workstation doing
the save is.
On a couple of occasions, something has gone wrong and the process stopped
between the last and next-to-last steps. In these cases, I ended up with
the randomly named temporary copy only -- the original, pre-updated copy
gets deleted, but the new copy doesn't get renamed. Fortunately, I was able
to open the temporary copy and save it with the old filename.
I certainly don't claim to know enough about this process to know if your
situation is the same as mine -- but it it seems to show similar symptoms.
-- David
