File name too long in Microsoft Excel 2008?

You may want to also post the question in the Microsoft Office For Mac 2016 forum: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2016?auth=1

The Mac operating system has supported very long file paths for eons. Microsoft however even though Office for Mac is of course running on top of the Mac operating system has had this problem also for eons. My own experience shows Office 2011 for Mac also had/has this problem.

Note: HFS+ the disk format predominantly used with Macs has a maximum file name limit of 255 characters, the entire file path can be much, much longer. See OS X: Cross-platform filename best practices and conventions - Apple Support . I believe for properly written programs i.e. not Microsoft and certainly not Adobe then the limit would be be well over a thousand characters for the entire file path. In fact it seems that while the file path limit for OS X might semi-officially be 1024 characters it is actually in reality essentially unlimited. See the following article for some highly detail information about this including comparison to other operating systems. You will see that Windows has a relatively feeble limit of 260 characters and perhaps this is why Office for Mac artificially limits its file path limit to such a low level even though it does not make sense to do so on a Mac.

http://insanecoding.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/pathmax-simply-isnt.html

I have not bothered upgrading (nee. downgrading 😉) to Office 2016 for Mac so I cannot confirm whether it still has this problem.

The file name limit in Excel (I'm testing with Office 2016) still seems to be the same as it has been in Windows since Win '95. It's 256 characters, which includes the path name.

I created a quick dummy file and tried saving it to the desktop. First with a ridiculously long name with over 3,000 characters. I kept whittling it down until Excel stopped telling me the file name was invalid. I only used alpha characters and numbers so the message couldn't be due to known invalid characters such as / : \ and some others.

It finally saved when the total was 256 characters. So the name was:

~/Desktop/xxx.xls

With the xxx being a long string of text so xxx.xls totaled 256 with ~/Desktop/ added in.

Yes, as mentioned above, the path is part of that 256 character limit. So in my example above, ~/Desktop/ is 10 characters, and Excel refused to save the file until I had the name down to 246 characters, of which .xls counts as 4.

Luckily, Excel didn't seem to count the true, full path against me. Which should have been (as far as Unix is concerned);

/Volumes/El Capitan/Users/my-user-account-name/Desktop/xxx.xls

You're welcome. 🙂