Word 2010 (MS Office 2010) - Path Name Too Long

[jamwatn]

Bit of a random pain with a few of the kid's MS Word.

On seemingly random occasions, on Ethernet or WiFi the kids get the error 'Word cannot open or save this file because the path name is too long".

The only way around it is of course to log off and back on again, or save the work to a memory stick then save it into their work drive area.

The kids have roaming profiles and use Folder redirection for Start Menu, Desktop etc and have a Network share (N: drive) where they can save their work to.

Weirdly, MS Word appears to be the only product with the problem.

 

Anyone else have any experience in this please? I think potentially it could be a bug in Word but we do have a patched version.

Thanks

[jamwatn]

Has anyone got any suggestions please?

[3s-gtech]

Are they doing the classic Word mistake of not putting a title on the document, so it defaults to saving the file name as the first piece of unpunctuated text? Ours often do it, and they think there's a tax on full stops and commas so the file name ends up being the entire path length in one go.

[jamwatn]

Sometimes the document is untitled and not saved before being worked on. Understandably this was my first thought, however there are times where they have been working on a document that is named and the same thing happens.

Weirdly, the work around is to save to a memory stick then re-save so it's almost like they are losing their connection to their network share briefly and then word is not able to understand that it's still got permissions to save in their share.

[Oaktech]

I suspect the issue that wherever your kids are saving to, by the time they have entered a filename that is long and descriptive - or not entered a filename and ended up with it called "The whole first paragraph of the document.docx" - the filename exceeds the total number of characters that a filename can be which is 255 characters.

 

Saving to a stick changes the path to the file from:

 

“\\server\userhomedriveshare$\studentshare$\username$\my documents\year 10 work\english\unit 10\week 3\this is the name of myfile because I havent put in a filename and it has ended up called the first paragraph of the document and I have exceeded 255 charcters.docx”

 

(incidentally, this path is 265 characters)

 

to D:\thisisthenameofmyfilebecauseIhaventputinafilenameandithasendedupcalledthefirstparagraphofthedocument.docx

 

and you are less than 255 characters and all is well.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Oaktech

[jamwatn]

This was also in our testing. Even if you change the first paragraph to a single character, we still get this issue. I should have mentioned this in my first post.