Dropbox does not open Excel files! (Cannot Find)

[Daniel F.9]

Error message trying to open .xls files using Excel 2013. "Cannot find" file if you double click the file from a Dropbox local folder which is green light synched. You can open the same file if you either copy it to the desktop or open it from the web-based dropbox. Dropbox support- please help! DDE option is unchecked in General settings in Excel. This does not change anything. Please help Dropbox support- this same bug is all over your question boards but still unanswered.

[Philip A.2]

This is what happen when companies scale. They forget their customers.

[Daniel F.9 · Accepted solution]

Credit to the corporate drop-box support- they answered the question immediately when i contacted them on chat. The problem was with excel not drop-box- Excel has a 256 character limit including extensions in the path. We had the excel file buried in too many subfolders with long names, taking us over the 256 character limit.

[micheoliva]

Hi Daniel.  I am experiencing this issue.  Can you explain the 256 character limit and burying of files in subfolders?  thanks!

[Norah]

Hi micheoliva, welcome to Dropbox Community!

There are files that your applications can't process correctly because they have file paths that are too long.

This behavior exists if there are more than 255 characters in the entire file path. This means from the C:\ all the way to the extension of a file.

i.e: if you had a test.txt file in your Dropbox that had the following path:

C:\Users\YourName\My Documents\Dropbox\test.txt

This file would have a path that is 47 characters long.

In previous versions of the Dropbox desktop application, files that fell into this limitation could be on the Dropbox website, but they couldn't be sent to a computer that was not able to store a file path of that length. The latest Dropbox desktop application versions have support for Dropbox to read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters.

Files will sync to and from those locations, however the applications used to open said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, Etc.) might not support reading from these locations with long file paths and may show error messages when trying to open, save or edit these files. This is out of our control since the application developers would have to add support for long paths to resolve the issue.

I suggest renaming a folder to a shorter name and omitting the illegal characters or reducing the number of sub-folders. For more details check here.

Let me know if this helps!

[mozeca]

??? makes no sense, the same file in same location, same filename opened just fine 2 weeks ago, won't today. Can't edit it.

[skytouch_usa]

This is a farse solution. Worked fine, then all of a sudden, BOOM, error messages on every excel message ... if this was the case, then why does a Microsoft Word file, same directory and even longer in a file name open just fine.
 

[This thread is now closed by moderators due to inactivity. If you're experiencing a similar behavior, feel free to start a new discussion in the Dropbox Community here.]