MS Excel 97 renaming shared file on save

[Colin]

We have a shared excel file that keeps getting renamed to
the 8.3 short name format when a couple of users make a
change to it. Is there a configuration option that would
affect this or is it a version issue ?
We are all on Excel 97.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Is it really 8.3 or is it just 8?

When you save a file in xl, it saves it as a temporary name (a funny 8
character name). If everything goes ok, xl will delete the original name and
then rename that funny name to the original's name.

But if something goes wrong, then excel gives you that message.

Typical things that can go wrong are interferance from antivirus software and
network errors (permissions or even hardware errors).

Can you disable the antivirus temporarily and see if you can eliminate that from
the list of possible causes? Or save to a local harddrive?

(kind a divide and conquer approach.)

 

[Guest]

No, it's renamed to the 8.3 short name, i.e. "Long File
Name.xls" becomes "longfi~1.xls".

thanks for the suggestion,
Colin

 

[Dave Peterson]

I don't use xl97 anymore.

But there have been a few posts about using xl97 on a windows XP pc. The name
can get truncated to one character (l.xls).

Here's a link to the post.
http://google.com/[email protected]

But if that's not it, you may want to post more details--OS version.

In fact, to me, this sounds more like a windows problem (but I really have no
idea). You may want to post in a Windows newsgroup.

I just searched google for "short filenames excel" and found a few hits.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=excel+short+filenames&num=100

This was across lots of newsgroups. Maybe you could add some more info to the
search and see if you get anything close to helpful.