Excel not saving/Networking

We had a problem appear last year on our Mac OS X 10.4 computers where Excel randomly stops saving. It just gives the message that it "Cannot save". There was some consolation in that some times the document had been saved but with an 8 digit hexadecimal name (minus the extension .xls).

Over the summer we have installed some lovely new shiny iMacs with OS X 10.5 and a new image. Office was installed separately afterwards.

The problem has started to show its head again but this time there is no 8 digit hexadecimal file so the kids are losing their work completely.

I suspect that it is network related, as I have never seen this on a stand-alone Mac, and yesterday having left a computer for an hour went back to it and it did save.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before and can offer some suggestions? It is driving me, and our students, crazy!:eek:

Many thanks

Andrew

Does the same happen if you use Save As? - I'd expect not if it was network related.

Yes, I am afraid so.

When doing a 'save as' you do get the dialog box to ask where to save the work but then it doesn't save it.

It is possible to do a save as and save the document with a new name. It appears in the users [network documents] folder in the finder with the current date and time. Excel will even report the document has its name changed in the title bar at the top. Then as soon as you quit Excel the document disappears from the finder - it is gone, vanished with no trace.

I then tried to save to a memory stick, which would suggest not a network problem, and it wouldn't save to the memory stick either with a 'document not saved' message.

I don't know if may be to do with local permissions and temporary file locations, etc. as our users have very little permissions on the local hard drive. I think almost everything goes over the network.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by educateer

I think almost everything goes over the network.

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When I said everything, I meant documents and user files. All the applications, etc. are still local.

There are 2 major issues that stop excel from saving with 10.5.

1) You need a .TemporaryItems folder at the root of the share that use users mount. This needs to be accessible for reading and writing by the users on that shared volume, I have several of these setup, one for each share point.

2) ACL reading does not work correctly in 10.5.0->10.5.3. I've found that with 10.5.4 excel correctly interprets the permissions on a remote folder (you can tell if this is broken as it will say the opened document is read only in excel).

totally forgot about this issue! must remember to add the Temp folder to my new shares.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. The .TemporaryItems didn't resolve the problem by itself so we will try and add the Temp folder today also.

I am really grateful for all of these replies as my stress levels are quite high at the moment with many of the kids losing their work each lesson.

I will feedback the results of your suggestions. I want to make sure I am adding the folders to the correct shares (all shares) before I reply.

Thanks again.

Andrew

just calm down take a break from it not worth having a heart attack over :D

when a user has problems is it possible to copy the data from 1 workbook to another and save that?

also what version of 10.5 are you running?

I will have to see if I can try a copy to a new document next time this happens. A lot of our students are starting to lose faith in the Macs because of this and are now booting to Windows!!!

We have added a .TemporaryItems folder to the network share and it appears to have lots of folders inside it so I assume something is working as expected, however we still have the 'document not saved' problem.

As we are storing the documents on a Windows server are there any other issues that you think we may have overlooked? Is there any special permissions magic that could be causing the problem. I remember a while ago that on Windows there are share permissions and user/group permissions. Could we have done something wrong here?

All suggestions gratefully received.

Andrew

The .TemporaryItems folder must be at the root of the share. OS X does not like mounting anything other than a direct subfolder of the share.

I have mine like this

04 (Share)
---A10001 (A Users folder)
---.TemporaryItems
05
---A11001
---.TemporaryItems

The user or their group must have FULL control over the .TemporaryItems folder. Read/Write is not sufficient as OS X will interperet this as a different combination of rwx unix permissions. You don't need to use everyone full from my experience, the primary group for the students should be ok.

The user must also have full control over their user area, again not having this will stop Excel from thinking the user has sufficient permissions.

Upgrade to 10.5.4 or later. The previous versions do not report ACLs correctly to Excel etc and it just won't work properly.

A big thank you to all that have helped to resolve this problem. It has been driving me crazy but it looks like it is now resolved.

I think the key thing that we had not done was not give the 'Full Access' permissions to the student's .TemporaryItems folder.

It appears that even though we have now resolved this issue for new documents for some reason some of the older ones that were having problems before still will not save, so copying all the sheets to a new documents and resaving has overcome that issue.

On top of all of this we have had another issue to compound my stress which was any macros recorded last year would not work and some students were getting an 'object library not found' message when starting Excel. Excel would then fail to load.

A quick search showed that the solution to that issue was to remove the following in the user preferences:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Registration Cache 11

One more week should see if all of the problems are resolved but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thank you again for all of your help.

Andrew