Fix Excel Locked For Editing
Charlie Gibby
I have an Excel sheet (not shared) stored in the company's shared folders, allowing any employee to access it. Normally, if someone is already editing the sheet, Excel notifies me that it's locked for editing and provides options to either wait for the other person to finish or open it in read-only mode. However, the Excel file has stopped giving this notification and allows multiple users to enter editing mode simultaneously. This creates an issue during the saving process when multiple people are working on the file. I attempted to recreate the sheet, but the problem persists. I also enabled a pop-out screen that allows users to enter in read-only mode, but for editing, we now need to coordinate with colleagues to ensure no one else is editing simultaneously. How can I restore the normal functionality where Excel notifies about the file being locked for editing?
If Excel is not providing the usual notification that a file is locked for editing when someone else is working on it, it might be due to various reasons. Here are some steps you can take to troubleshoot and potentially resolve the issue:
After trying these steps, check if the issue persists. If the problem continues, there may be other factors specific to your environment or Excel setup, and you might want to consult with your company's IT support for further assistance. OR adding more information to your topic. Information such as Excel version, operating system, storage medium, file extension, photos or file (without sensitive data),etc. In this link you will find some more information about it: Welcome to your Excel discussion space!
A user is reporting that they cannot open an Excel file (on a shared folder) as it is locked for editing by another user. The user stated left the company a long time ago, but in my experience it is not that unusual for Excel/Word to report the incorrect user.
I was running out of ideas so decided to copy the file, delete the original and then rename the copied file to the same name as the original. As soon as I rename the file back to the original name, the same error occurs. If the file has a different name, it works fine.
Does this just happen when one user opens the file? Or when any user opens the file? If just a specific user opening the file, verify that the user is opening the shared file and not a copy of the file.
In my experience I theorized that what caused the incorrect user to display as having the file opened was that when Office was initially installed it was registered with that users name. I cannot recall if I ever confirmed that being the issue or not though.
Is your fileshare server running Windows server? If so, try Computer Management > Shared Folders > Open Files from the server and search for the file based on the path, not the username. The username with the file open from the endpoint can sometimes be wrong.
This will get you started but you are better off running it overnight as it will take a while any computer located in AD that returns the process open (you choose which one excell is winword) and possibly stuck. For my example, I used chrome which I know is chrome.exe but I wanted to make sure so I used wildcard. Although it errors out it just silently continues searching through AD computers. Error is kinda nice tells you which computers cant be reached therefore it may be time for a cleanup.
Yeah, restarting usually clears all connections. Another not so intense method we used to do is to stop and start the Netlogon service. It will disconnect all active users. It might also clear the locked file issue.
I'm in a bit of a bind and need some help here. I have an Excel spreadsheet that is currently locked for editing, and I need to unlock the sheet to make some necessary updates. Unfortunately, I don't have the password, and the person who originally locked it is not available to provide it.
I'm looking for methods or tools that can help me unlock this spreadsheet. Has anyone here faced a similar situation and found a solution? I'm open to suggestions. The spreadsheet is work-related, and I have the right to access and edit it.
VBA Magic: If you're feeling a bit techy, you can create a new macro in Excel and use some VBA code that's floating around the internet to unlock sheets. Not rocket science, but it does the trick.
In the last few weeks I am getting users calling me telling me that an excel document that they are trying to access is locked for editing by a user who is no longer here and has not been here for about 2 years. The User in question is our previous network administrator. His user account is disabled in AD and most of the files that are having this issue were created after he left. Any ideas on why this is happening and how to rectify it?
This has worked for me in the past but I tried it today and I it switched from being locked by username to locked by another user. I have even tried taskkill /f /m (/im) in the past but my switches are working like the used to.
Another thing you can do sometimes is check in your My Documents - Tools - Folder Options and checking that you have hidden files showing. For some documents you can then see a 1KB file for the open document for anyone who the system thinks has the document open. Delete the file if you know they are not using the document.
A few of my users are in and out of various Excel 2007 spreadsheets all day. One of them reports that "50% of the time" she tries to open a spreadsheet from the file server, an information message comes up stating:
To resolve this issue, first confirm that another user on the network does not have the document open. If the document is in use, open the document as read-only. If it is not in use, quit all instances of Word, and then remove the owner file. To do so, follow these steps.
If there are multiple people that could be editing the doc, it can sometimes be hard to figure out who might have the doc open. As shown on TechTalkMadness, the best way to find the answer is to use Computer Management on the system that hosts the shared file.
Go to Computer Management -> System Tools -> Shared Folders -> Open Files to find out who has a document locked. If the user can't be contacted to disconnect themselves, you can forcefully do so by right clicking the locked file and selecting Close Open File (warning: the user might lose their changes).
Anyway what solved our problem was by turning the details tab off in Explorer (this is under Windows 7 - click Organise where the menu bar is normally, then Layout, then make sure Details is unticked - and also Preview by the sounds of it.)
Doing this immediately fixed our problem. It seems that with the details tab visible it keeps the file open for too long and Office apps can't then access it. This also explains why people were having problems opening documents they had created themselves and nobody else was using.
On XP, Turn off indexing service like this: click the Start button, then Search. From the window that opens, choose Change preferences (bottom left). Click "Without Indexing Service", the "No, do not enable Indexing service" radio button, and OK.
I found the problem by downloading handle.exe. handle.exe tells you which program has the file open, and in my case it turned out to be cidaemon.exe. A quick google confirmed that it is the actual indexer of Windows' indexing service.
I've seen this error today, when another user genuinely did have the file open. The problem was that Excel tells the second user that it's 'another user' rather than reporting the first user's actual name, making it difficult to work out who has it open.
In our case the first user with the file open is on Excel 2007; the second user is on Excel 2010; perhaps there's some incompatibility which causes the second user's Excel to be unable to get the real name.
Turned out that the issue was as follows: Previously computer was being used and logged in by a local account. After I joined AD, i copied Application Data and Local Settings folder (on Windows XP) to AD user profile. After the operation i later discovered that Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office didn't have permissions for newly created user and thus office was prompting me with this dialog for every file. I had previously tried disabling firewall/antivirus on host and client machines, disabling indexing service on host machine, but none helped.
Here is what I found in our environment. All users "My Documents" maps to a network share on our SAN. We run a terminal server with Office installed that utilizes the same network share on our SAN. If an end user is using an Office product, and then does not log off completely but rather X out, the the file is shown as locked by the person who installed Office on the terminal server (yours truly).
Unlocker is a tool that can trace and unlock the locking protection commonly used in files on Microsoft Windows. However, its main use is to terminate the processes that are using a certain file, or force the processes to stop using the file, so the user can safely delete, rename or move the file.
Another way, if you have access to the file server is to use the command openfiles.exe. In my case Word said I was locking the file, but openfiles.exe showed that it was a different user. Eg if part of the filename was "birthday", you'd use this command:
Several files that were created by me and stored within my dropbox now come up with the message "This file is locked for editing" followed by name of file, followed by "You can open the file as read-only". Yet all other folders and files are fine. Please advise.
I have two computers, a Lenovo Laptop (windows) and an IMac. I can update files only on the Lenovo. When I try to use the IMac I always get the "This file is locked for editing" message and can only use the "read only" option.
Reboot sometimes removes spurious locks. Not today. It DOES sound like some program opens at startup and opens the file (possible as an MRU - most recently used) for editing. IOW it is an OS problem, not a DB problem.
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