Error Message (2000)

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A user came to me with a diskette that contains two Excel worksheets that he copied off of his computer here, took home and made some revisions and is trying to load back onto his computer. (His OS is Win ’95 but he doesn’t know the version of Excel.) When I try and open either file I get a message that I haven’t seen before; “‘Flow Meter Record Sheet.xls’ cannot be accessed. The file may be read only, or you may be trying to access a read-only location. Or, the server the document is saved on is not responding.”
The files were not saved as read only, I successfully loaded and retrieved another Excel program onto the same disk and I also did a scandisk on the floppy which didn’t show any errors.
I have tried to open both files as read only or open them as a copy with no success. I tried to copy onto the hard drive and got a message that said “Cannot copy Flow Meter Record Sheet: The system cannot read from the specified device.”, but it read from the same diskette without a problem when I loaded another Excel file onto it.
Am I missing something, or is the data lost in space.

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If you can’t copy the files from the diskette, it would seem that they’re damaged, even if ScanDisk doesn’t report an error.

Probably the easiest thing to do is give the user a fresh new diskette and let him copy the worksheets to it.

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Possibly the diskette head alignment is very different between the home machine and work machines. If a lot of time has been lost, see if the user can read teh files at home, and e-mail the files to work from there.

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I received the same error message using excel 97. However no floppy disk was involved. I moved the file from my documents to a drive on the main server. Then next time I tried to open it I got the message.

even though it says “read only” I can’t even open the spreadsheet.

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Tip 1:

*never* Open/Save directly from any office program to floppy disk. Office is reknown for causing trouble with floppies.

Tip 2:

The readonly message most likely stems from the fact that the user has removed the floppy *before* closing the workbook(s) in Excel.

Tip 3:

If one gets readonly messages from files that are on HD’s, one usually has had a crash of XL and it hasn’t closed all of it’s files properly. A reboot often helps.

Tip 4:

Download Autosafe.zip from http://www.bmsltd.ie/mvp%5B/url%5D

Edited Mar 13th 2004 to update link

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