Getting error that your document cannot be saved due to encryption in Excel

[Wtfood]

Here's a little public service (and a reference point for me the next time this happens if I forget) for people stuck with this type of Excel behavior. You try to save a file (for me, 53Mb excel file using extensive VBA and auto-filtering to an NTFS compressed network share) and get the following type of message. Your changes could not be saved to '<<filename>>.xls", but were saved to a temporary document named 'D933D120'. Close the existing document, then open the temporary document and save it under a new name." You attempt to save and get an error "File not saved". You close, reboot, wait for a three-quarter moon etc etc, try to open the temporary file and get the error "Excel cannot access 'D933D120'. The document may be read-only or encrypted."

Thank you to those authors describing the above as a garbage bucket error message, commonly having nothing to do with either read-only attributes or encryption, which got me thinking "what else could stop a file being opened".

Here's the solution;

• Right click the file
• Properties
• Security

For me, the security settings were blank. It appears that the saving process which creates this temp file when "overwriting" (actually creates new file(the temp file above), deletes old, renames new with old name) an old file fell over before it could apply the relevant access lists and rename the file. Simply add yourself as an authorized user for the file, with full permissions. I was then able to open the file, rename etc, as described on the original error message.

[Go!pee]

It's been a few hours I already working on the problem, I have the same message with Excel 2003. I read other topics expressing this problem, this would apparently encryption with NTFS file system. Here is what happened in my case. Long ago I had activated the encryption of a file on an ntfs drive, containing personal and confidential documents. I forgot that little detail since. My XP was too "fly" and I decided to reformat and start fresh. When I come to open ALL the files in question (firstly they are green in the file explorer) I was told that I have no access to this file. I already tried many solutions for encryption and security keys for ntfs forgotten but without success.

[Panop]

I do not know if this is a solution, but you can perhaps tried to right click on your file, before opening it, and uncheck "Read Only". Check the file settings.