MS Office 2013 - Power Point

[Harry1980]

In PowerPoint 2013 on Windows 7 - 64 bit, when File / Save as is selected, an error message comes up stating, "An error occurred while opening the file dialog. Please save your presentation, exit, and restart PowerPoint." This is an intermittent issue and also affects Excel 2013. I have tried repairing it, done windows update and also uninstalled and reinstalled but no luck. I have researched this issue but it relates to Office 2007 and 2010 and the resolution does not support 2013.

 

Has anyone come across this issue? If so how did you resolve it?

 

Many thanks….

[Andy2789]

We are having exactly the same problem did you ever find a solution to this? It started with a few users now it is effecting a large proportion and we can't work out why it is happening!

[stitch]

Afternoon both

 

Did you ever overcome the situation with powerpoint 2013?

[Andy2789]

Hi Stich

 

No sadly we still have the same problem, it is intermittent at the moment and found if you open Internet Explorer up the problem goes away. We can’t work out the link between them! Or how to fix it, it’s driving us mad!

[themightymrp]

Have you tried disabling any Add-ins and seeing if that stops it?

[mattpant]

I too am getting this same issue with Windows 8.1 Update 1 clients and Office 2013 installs - but only with using a new Mandatory profile that I've setup for users using Windows 8 - if I change the profile back to our old one they used with Windows XP machines and the user logs on the issue does not happen in Office / PowerPoint - so it appears to be something within the profile or the ntuser.dat/man file that's causing the problem?

 

The issue didn't seem to be there with the account I used when creating the mandatory profile.

 

HELP!! It's driving is bonkers! I really need to switch the users profiles over to the new one I've setup as the login times on the old one take forever!!

Thanks

 

Matt

[xenonive]

This might help An error occured while opening the file dialog

[Arthur]

but only with using a new Mandatory profile that I've setup for users using Windows 8 - if I change the profile back to our old one they used with Windows XP machines and the user logs on the issue does not happen in Office / PowerPoint

Windows 8.1 can't use the same profiles as Windows XP so it sounds like there is something wrong with your mandatory profile.

 

Try creating a brand new profile using the method described here.

[mattpant]

Hi Arthur,

 

That's what I'm saying - using a Windows XP based profile on the Windows 8 machines which you would expect problems with actually has no issues with any Office 2013 program BUT creating a brand new Mandatory profile specifically for the a Windows 8 clients DOES have the issue with Office 2013 program's!

 

Weird ?!?

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[Arthur]

using a Windows XP based profile on the Windows 8 machines which you would expect problems with actually has no issues

Windows 8.1 uses v4 profiles though.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2890783

 

Perhaps what is actually happening when you logon to a Windows 8.1 computer, is that Windows is using the local default user profile when you do not have the mandatory profile set for that user?

 

BUT creating a brand new mandatory profile specifically for the a Windows 8 clients DOES have the issue with Office 2013 program's!

How are you creating the mandatory profile? If you are using the "Win Enabler" method, then I would expect issues like the one you describe.

[mattpant]

Windows 8.1 uses v4 profiles though.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2890783

 

Perhaps what is actually happening when you logon to a Windows 8.1 computer, is that Windows is using the local default user profile when you do not have the mandatory profile set for that user?

 

 

How are you creating the mandatory profile? If you are using the "Win Enabler" method, then I would expect issues like the one you describe.

The profile has been created twice - 1 using the copy and paste and editing the registry - and the 2nd time using the sysprep and copy profile switch / both have led to the same problem with office programs

[Andy2789]

We have thesame issue that it is definitely something in their roaming profiles, youdelete their profile and first login they are fine. As soon as they log off andon again the problem comes back!

 

[garlik_bread]

Has anyone ever found a resolution for this issue?

 

We have recently discovered that the vast majority of our machines are effected with the same problem. When loading PowerPoint 2013 or Excel 2013, any attempt to open the File Dialogue fails, especially for a Save As which gives "An error occurred while opening the file dialog. Please save your presentation, exit, and restart PowerPoint".

 

Only resolution appears to be to open IE before PowerPoint, which then allows you to open the File Dialogue. I have scripted a workaround .vbs which opens IE minimised, then PowerPoint/Excel, but this is only a workaround.

 

This issue only affects the users when the Desktop is redirected to a server, which we have been doing by GPO for many years. If I remove the folder redirection GPO, the problem goes away (i have tried redirecting the desktop with a registry preference, but this still causes the issue). Also, it seems fine on the initial logon, but the second logon gets the error.

 

We are using roaming profiles, but by removing the roaming profile the issue still happens, but something is definitely getting written back to the profile after first logon.

 

Other Office applications are not affected, such as Word and Project etc. Rolling back to Office 2010 resolves the issue, but we have been using Office 2013 for over a year in our environment. We have also tested multiple Windows 7 Enterprise builds, vanilla installs, not updated and fully updated, AV and no AV.

[Andy2789]

What internet filtering are you using? Believe it or not, finally after nearly 2 years we found the answer to be being caused by Smoothwall. This only got fixed 2 days ago!

[garlik_bread]

What internet filtering are you using? Believe it or not, finally after nearly 2 years we found the answer to be being caused by Smoothwall. This only got fixed 2 days ago!

 

Very little apparently, I know we use TMG Firewall but our Systems Infrastructure team say there is very little ougoing filtering.

[Andy2789]

Are you using Proxy authentication or anything like that? NTML or Kerberos?

[garlik_bread]

Are you using Proxy authentication or anything like that? NTML or Kerberos?

 

Yeah, Kerberos I believe.

 

I was so hopeful for this fix, but just tried it and it doesnt appear to work

[Tightstring]

Sounds to me its permissions on the redirected folders!

[Andy2789]

I originally thought permissions but it's to do with Office trying to contact Office 365 servers, we had to add exceptions in for the address it was trying to get to. Opening Internet Explorer obviously authenticates with the upstream Proxy which then gives Office the connection it wants. Office can't trigger the authentication itself so instead decides it won't do anything, we had it for 2 years real pain!

[garlik_bread]

I originally thought permissions but it's to do with Office trying to contact Office 365 servers, we had to add exceptions in for the address it was trying to get to. Opening Internet Explorer obviously authenticates with the upstream Proxy which then gives Office the connection it wants. Office can't trigger the authentication itself so instead decides it won't do anything, we had it for 2 years real pain!

 

It's definitely a pain, I've spent days on this so far and there's surprisingly little out there. Not even sure if this has been happening for the last year running Office 2013, or if its a recent issue? We've been looking into allsorts from build issues, Windows versions, roaming profiles, group policy, folder redirection.

 

Will look at the O365 exception now, thanks for the tips!

[themightymrp]

It definitely could be the O365 exception due to the OneDrive support of Office 2013. We had something similar recently when kids were trying to add attachments to email using the Outlook web access - it kept throwing up errors as it tried to connect to OneDrive. Didn't happen for staff, it turned out that the URL filters had already been updated with exceptions for staff and that's all that was missing.

 

Similar issue, but could be the answer.

[garlik_bread]

Well we've come to a conclusion of sorts for this issue, so going to post up our resolution in case it helps anyone else!

 

We checked the firewall and exclusions etc. ran Wireshark tests and eventually gave the machine in questions unrestricted access past the Firewall, but nothing helped.

 

We knew that the issue only happened when a Desktop Folder Redirection Group Policy Object was active on the machine so started playing about with that. We tried creating new Desktop shares, and moving stuff about. We eventually realised that the problem stopped happening if we used a Desktop share that was much shorter.

Originally the Desktop was redirected to \\ServerName\Desktops\Student\studentWIN7\Desktop, but when creating a new share and instead redirecting to \\ServerName\StudentW7Desktop it worked.

 

We presume this must be something to do with a maximum path length for PowerPoint and Excel, which we've read is 259 chars. It seems a bit strange to me, but at the end of the say it's working.

[Graham_K]

What internet filtering are you using? Believe it or not, finally after nearly 2 years we found the answer to be being caused by Smoothwall. This only got fixed 2 days ago!

 

Hi Andy, I appreciate this is an old thread, we have also recetly started experiencing this same problem with Windows 10, Powerpoint 2016 and a Smoothwall firewall on the network. What did you do in the end to fix this?

 

Many Thanks,

Graham

[Andy2789]

Hi Graham

 

Just had a look through and tried to remember what they were, we put the following into the authentication exception list on our Smoothwall. So it bypassed the need for the students to open the internet where it would do the Kerberos or NTML handshake, these are the sites I can easily spot in our list. Try those, I know there is a Smoothwall group now for Office 365. So it could be worth adding that into the authentication exception if this doesn't work. If it doesn't work I can go through our list and see if I can spot any others, but the below are ringing a bell for me!

 

msftconnect.com, msftncsi.com, odc.officeapps.live.com, office.microsoft.com, office15client.microsoft.com

[Andy2789]

There is also this list of website that Microsoft have released, towards the end you will see some of the above mentioned https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges