Excel won't let me save, and then the file is gone?!

[Suanne Lippman]

I am running Office98 on a 1 year old Emachines and WXP home.

About 6 months ago when I tried to save a spreadsheet it would say the
spreadsheet can't be saved, but the system was saving it to a temporary file
with some bizarre name. It told me to open the temporary file and then save
it.

Well, I never did find the temporary files, but had to recreate the
spreadsheets. Now I find I can copy the sheet to the clipboard, close the
existing file, create a new spread sheet and paste the clipboard. The old
file is then simply gone, so I can save the new file to the old name.

Any idea what is going on here? It is really obnoxious. It was okay until
6 months ago, and I am still running Excel98 on another WXP machine without
problem.

No other programs seem to be affected, or I would think it is a
system/hardware problem.

Thanks.

 

[Suanne Lippman]

Only about 1 out of 5 saves get the error message. I should have mentioned
that.

 

[George Nicholson]

Are the files you are opening on removable media (floppy, CD)? If so, don't
do that. Saving Excel files to removable media causes problems (iirc, Excel
doesn't simply replace the old file, it creates a new file, deletes the old
& renames the first so you need to have twice the filesize available and if
the space isn't available, etc., you've got a problem).

Copy them to a hard drive/server first.

HTH,

 

[Guest]

This used to happen to me frequently when I worked for a small company that
had a very unreliable network. Anytime there was a hit on the network, if I
had a network file open at that time, it would act as you describe. Only
solution was to SAVE many tmes per day, until I could get a new job.........

Vaya con Dios,
Chuck, CABGx3