Excel sheet Read only

that darn '/'

This has driven me nuts for weeks on end. I have date stamped my folders for many years but recently I have loaded all my file onto a Windows share at work and kept a sync copy on my ext drive. No matter what I did with permissions I could not edit an existing file. Changing the '/' to '-' worked fine. So simple

Thank you

This did the trick! Should have checked here first before wasting hours!!! Thank you sir!

I had this exact scenario - this worked, good solution!! Thank you!

I also had this problem but did not have any unusual characters in the file names. File located on a USB that was formatted Fat 32 MS DOS. Ownership of volume not enabled. I was able to save the file as a new version but this just narked me. In the end I found that by by removing the spaces out of the name, the problem went away. Who would have thought? Spaces, they got the power.

We had this problem on a file that had no unusual characters in its name (we were already aware of the dangers of /), but we noted that the file had a .xlsx extension, and found that saving it as .xls cleared the Read Only restriction, after which, we were able to 'upgrade' the file back to .xlsx. I suspect that the Read Only tag had arisen from the file's closure not being properly recognised, and the system thinking that the file was still open.

A bit more research reveals the following:

1. XLS is based on BIFF (Binary Interchange File Format) and as such, the informationis directly stored to a binary format.
2. On the other hand, XLSX is based on the Office Open XMLformat, a file format that was derived from XML. The information in an XLSX file is stored in a text file that uses XML to define all its parameters.
3. As XLSX is stored in a text file format, Microsoft decided to remove macro support for this file format. Instead they assigned a totally different file extension that allows the use of macros; it is named XLSM. The older XLS file extension does not have this issue and it is able to hold spreadsheets that contain macros or not.
4. In general, .xlsx/.xlsm files are somewhat less likely to become corrupt, and can be smaller, but if you make regular backups and have plenty of disk space, there's no reason to spend the time converting.

   OTOH, there's usually no reason not to take advantage of the OOXML formats for new files that you create.

5. XLSX allows many types of formatting that XLS does not, all of those will be changed or lost.
6. Complex XLS files may support 4000 styles, compared to 65,536 in XLSX.
7. If you exceed the XLS limit all the others will be lost for sure, but it may be that all formats are lost if you exceed the 4000 limit.

Thanks samuel! I been trying and trying to figure out why that one document was saving as 'read-only'. It's a timesheet I made, so I was saving it as 10/3 time, 10/17 time, and so on . Weird how that one / makes it save that way.

anyway, thank you

Thanks William. I had the same problem with a file that I could not get out of "read only", and your solution solved the problem for me.

WOW! Years of frustration on a daily basis finally resolved with your helpful suggestion. It turns out every file I had an issue with was because I had the "/" in the name of the file which is how I name almost every file with a month and year for chronological ordering. Thank you!

Awesome!!! Removing "/" helps me!

Another reason an Excel file might be opening as Read-Only: it might be in use by Word as the source file for a mail merge. If you need to edit the source file, you have to close the Word document that's using it first.

Nice tip, thanks! 🙂

Thank you. Yes been having the same problem for a few weeks. Knocking off the s worked. Phew!!!

Thank you for such a great tip! That was my problem: not closing the Word document when editing the source file. Now I know!

THANKS! no more frustration!

I had the same question. Thank you very much for the back slash "\" answer. It worked for me.