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.
Bookmarks