Excel 2002 - User in file

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VegasNath
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Excel 2002 - User in file

Post by VegasNath »

We have a file on a shared drive that is used by 20+ people in our department, not shared for obvious reasons, so the gereral rule is only to access with write access when required, and get out as soon as you finish.

On Friday we came accross a problem whereby excel was reporting that a colleague was in the file with write access, but she was not. We tried all the usual things, closing excel, rebooting..... no joy. Even she was unable to write to the file, as she was also being told that she was already in it. This lasted several hours before our unhelpful helpdesk managed to clear it, but I would like to get to grips with the cause.

This is not the first time that this has occured, but the footprint usually clears itself after a reboot.

Any ideas as to the cause and how one would normally go about clearing it?

I tried saving the file as something else and then saving over the old file without success.
:wales: Nathan :uk:
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HansV
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Re: Excel 2002 - User in file

Post by HansV »

If it's on a network drive, there's probably not much you can do about it. The network admin should look into it, perhaps there's a setting that keeps files locked longer than necessary. The network admin is also the only one who can manually unlock a file on a network drive, I believe.
Best wishes,
Hans

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StuartR
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Re: Excel 2002 - User in file

Post by StuartR »

On the serving computer you can right click on My Computer and choose Manage, then expand Shared Folders in the left pane and select Open Files.

This should show which computer has the file open, and you can right click the file and choose "Close open file" to force it to close.
StuartR


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Jan Karel Pieterse
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Re: Excel 2002 - User in file

Post by Jan Karel Pieterse »

Alternatively, the user might have the file still open in a hidden instance of Excel, check task manager.
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Jan Karel Pieterse
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VegasNath
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Re: Excel 2002 - User in file

Post by VegasNath »

Thanks all. Hopefully this won't happen again, but it certainly a pain when it does!
:wales: Nathan :uk:
There's no place like home.....