Office 2010 not saving changes on 2003 xls

[MaXiM]

Hi, I'm having a very annoying problem with a mixed windows 7 xp environment. The computers have also some office 2003 PC's and some using Office 2010.

 

I have seen users edit an excel spreadsheet written in 2003 on a 2010 version of Excel but only to find that any changes they made are not reflected on the document when opened on another computer! They have to go back to the PC they were on to open the document and see the changes?! If they save the file as the new excel 2010 format then they are able to view the changes on both computers (as long as the computer has the compatiablility pack installed.)

 

I have checked and double checked the folder they are saving to and they are saving in the same location!!! It doesn't complain when saving in office 2010 either, it saves it but only to find the changes do not reflect on the spreadsheet when opened up in office 2003.

 

This is such a strange problem that I'm struggling to figure out why it's happening.

 

I really don't want to have to go backwards and install 2003 office on any of the new coputers..

 

Anybody any ideas?

[MaXiM]

Got there eventually. It was to do with offline files being switched on and even though I had turned off the service for offline files the cache process was still running (CSC offline files driver)

See this:

How to Properly Disable Offline Files in Windows Vista - Ask the Directory Services Team - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

[ChrisH]

I am seeing similar problems trying to save office files from a win 7 laptop, the only problem is I need it to use offline files. I am working through some fixes but I am having no luck so far.

[MaXiM]

Thankfully I don't use offline files.. from previous experiences it was a bit of a mine field.

To access files offsite I went down the TS Remote APPS route which works far better than I expected it would.

 

One thing I did notice when offline files was enabled was that if you save the files in the native format of the newer version of office then it seemed to replicate successfully. Although the older versions of office would need the compatibility pack installed.. Not really a solution but that did appear as a work around.

 

If you find a solution for that I would love to hear about it. It does seem like a complete flaw in the windows design model.

What do they expect nobody is going to use different versions of office in a mixed XP W7 environment?!

Edited May 16, 2011 by MaXiM

[MaXiM]

Maybe you could try turning off the CSC caching driver... probably won't work because it's part of the offline files system but might be worth a try.

 

Just make sure you back up the users files before trying that... cos it might delete all their cached files