[ms office - 2013] Excel and Powerpoint 2013 Saving a new file sometimes doesn't work

[dapaulio]

Hi

We have installed office 2013 on Windows 7 Clients this year and have found random domain users on random individual machines are not able to save a new document. Saving pre-existing documents are fine. I have only notice this happen to pupils and staff who are restricted members of our network. local and domain admins don't appear to have a problem when saving.

 

All staff and students have a profile path defined in AD as \\server\username$

 

When the affected user creates an Excel or Powerpoint and tries to save it the browse dialog does not appear when clicked.

This does not seem to affect other office apps eg word as the affected user is able to save new documents

the symptoms do NOT follow the user if they were to log on to another computer

the symptoms are NOT present if another user logs on to the same computer as the affected user

 

something I noticed when the affected users can not save, there is only username$ profile path as a recent location unlike the users who can have two recent destinations, Username$ and desktop redirect location. As a restricted user they all have as you expect read only permission to the redirected desktop share on our server. \\server\Desktop$\desktop

 

to remedy the issue short term we can delete the users local profile on the computer and when she logs back on the user is able to save new spreadsheets or powerpoints again. the desktop share also reappears in the recent location which leads me to wonder what it is about the desktop share that causes this to happen and only to new xls and ppt.

 

A workaround is also cloning another file, renaming it and deleting the contents, re saving as you work. I am taking a punt that for what ever reason the first time they run an office application for the first time on a computer it is corrupting something whilst their profile is being cached

 

 

Has anyone any ideas. any questions I will be happy to answer

 

Thanks in advance

Paul

[T_Lister]

We suffer the same problem a lot with PowerPoint. The quick solution I'm using is copying the slides into a new file and then saving. That seems to work. Obviously not the ideal solution though...

[Steve21]

Get the same sometimes too, but generally find if you close the program, reopen mydocs/homedrive, and try again it works. Almost like it's losing the link somehow Only in Office 2013 though...

 

Steve

[Michael]

Two things come to mind -

 

- Are users using local profiles rather than roaming, hence why the problem doesn't follow them around

- Are you running Office 2013 SP1 and any other fixes?

[Michael]

Also, what's the purpose making the redirected desktop a hidden share? No real benefit in doing this surely?

 

Have you considered using the FQDN in your server/documents paths? I've done this for years now with better results.

[T_Lister]

We've inherited a network where all the pupils have roaming profiles (something to be dealt with this summer). Redirected desktop however.

[JCovarrubias]

I dont know if I should start another thread as this one describes very similar experiences that i am encountering and don't mean to hijack this thread.

-At some point with no reason at all, users can't open their documents that are saved in a personal network share "H" drive.

-Word or powerpoint, the heaviest used by the staff, will load the splash screen and quickly blink (shuts down and restarts) and then continue to load the templates page, like if Word was opened and not an existing document.

-If we open word first and try to file open, it crashes and reloads to the templates page.

-It works if we copy the file from the H drive to the local desktop and open the file from there.

-We also can't save into the H when this happens.

-We believe it has something to do with the cache folder. If we delete the cache folder, we are able to open up the document from the network drive, but we get a warning about repairing the cache.

-if we try to repair, it goes through the process but nothing is changed. The same error occurs no matter what at this point.

-Deleting of the profile is the only work around at the moment. This happens so randomly to different people and asking them to save anything they have on the desktop or my documents can be a pain for both of us if something accidentally gets deleted (School Administrators).

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated so we can work some type of solution and have ready if this continues to happen. This has been ongoing since we rolled out Office 2013 in November, with about a total of 9 different instances this has happened in about 250 computers.

[TheITGuy83]

I also had this problem and after many hours of testing have found a solution......well it worked for me anyway.

Group Policies!!!!!

I put a test user in an OU that had only default domain policies linked to it and tested the save & browse buttons in Excel & Powerpoint 2013, it worked.

One by one i added in additional group policies, restarted, tested, until i found a GP that broke the buttons.

In my case it was a 'Known Folder' i had disabled, the Desktop Folder {B4BFCC3A-DB2C-424C-B029-7FE99A87C641}. I have a heap of 'Known Folders' disabled as we are a school, I don't want the students saving locally as nearly everything is redirected.

I never had any issues with Office 2010 with these disabled folders but for some reason Office 2013 doesnt like them.

 

User Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / File Explorer / Disable Known Folders.

 

I would be interested to see if this is the case for other people experiencing this problem.