"your change could not be saved" error

[Heather Forrest]

I have a shared workbook on our server. At what seems to be completely
random, either I or a co-worker will get the following message when
attempting to save the changes we have made to the shared workbook:
"Your changes could not be saved to "joes Schedule.xls." but were saved to a
temporary document named 'F3AD400'. Close the existing document, then open
the temporary document and save it under a new name."

In the meantime, while I scrambling open the temporary document (which is
NOT saved as an excel worksheet but as a "file") anyone attempting to access
the shared workbook gets the following message:
"Unexpected file lock by (co-workers name). Please try again, and then if
necessary use the share workbook command (tools menu) to turn off sharing."
Well- the almost amusing part is that sometimes the person whose name it
lists in the message is mine!

This whole process is both aggrivating and time consuming. The only way I
know of to get things rolling again is to try to close out the original file
(which sometimes lists that users still have open- even if they do not) then
open the "temporary file", save that as an xls, delete the original file (or
at least move it so that no one attempts to open the non-functional
worksheet). I am deathly afraid of losing information during this process!

Any idea why this is happening? I cannot seem to find the trigger. Thank
you in advance for your help!

 

[Bill Manville]

This could be caused by a virus checker running on the server.

Whenever Excel saves a file it saves to a temporary file (with a random
8-character hexadecimal name); it then deletes the original xls file
and renames the temporary file with the original xls name. This is to
minimise the chance of the file being lost if there are problems during
the save.

This procedure may fail for a number of reasons:
- there have been cases where virus checkers have intervened to check
the temporary file, preventing its rename
- there are cases where users have not had delete or rename permissions
on the network directory.

I don't have experience of using shared workbooks, having been
frightened off them by the number of problems that I have seen
reported. However, this problem has also occurred for non-shared
workbooks.

Bill Manville
MVP - Microsoft Excel, Oxford, England

 

[Heather Forrest]

hmm...any suggestions as to how to avoid this problem? If it is indeed the
virus checker running on the server that is causing this error, is there
anything I can do to avoid this problem?

Also- any ideas on why it would only happen on my shared workbooks? I see
that you mention that it can happen on non-shared files as well, but so far
only my shared files seem to be effected.

Thank you so much for your help!