Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

File Server: Windows Small Business Server 2003 (Standard Edition)
Workstations: Windows Vista Professional/Windows 7 Professional/Windows XP Professional
(All workstations are using Office XP 2003 Professional)

Greetings,

I have been perplexed by an issue that came up at the same time I started using OpenOffice 3.3.0. Due to the constraints of opening spreadsheets with more than 66K lines of data in Excel 2003 (which ultimately needed to be imported into a table in Access 2003), I installed OpenOffice. It worked great. All I did was open the .xlsx spreadsheet within Calc and save it as a .csv to a shared server file (mapped drive). I was then able to import the .csv into a table in Access and go on with life.

At the same time I started using Calc, other users on the network complained that some Excel files on the server would no longer open. I was dismissing this as mere coincidence, but now I am not so sure. Is it possible that OpenOffice Calc tags something in the server registry that might cause this? My research results are below:

1) Excel files on a mapped drive to the server will not open. Excel will launch and act as though it is opening the file, but ultimately never does. The size of the file does not seem to matter.
2) Calc will open the same file from the same location that Excel could not open with no delay.
3) If you copy the Excel file from the server to the local workstation, it opens right up in Excel with no delay whatsoever.
4) Other Excel files on the same server directory open up right away within Excel, but I cannot pinpoint (because I do not remember) if these are the same files I had originally modified with Calc.
5) It does not matter if the workstation has OpenOffice installed or not.
6) It does not matter what OS the workstation is running.
7) I have checked the File Options to ensure that Excel is the default startup application.

Any ideas?

Kind regards,
Paul

You may need to observe/analyse your low level network transactions with a utility sch as Wireshark.

Did you find a solution to this problem? I have the same issue.

Problem solved. It turns out (as I thought) that Office Calc had nothing to do with this issue. Coincidentally, around the same time I installed OpenOffice, there was a Microsoft Update that did a peculiar thing. I can only interpret it as building obsolescence into their older products to get you frustrated enough to buy their newer product. BUT, that is all speculation, so I'll just leave it there.

On to the solution... The update from Microsoft built in a new security feature that scans the spreadsheet file as it is opened. Older versions of Office are not compatible with this feature and that's why they hang (or open very slowly). There is a registry hack that fixes it and it took all of two minutes to do.

Here are the steps that I copied and pasted from a website I found with the fix:

1. Exit Excel.
2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. Locate and then click to select the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0
4. After you select the key that is specified in step 3, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
5. Type Excel, and then press ENTER.
6. Select Excel, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
7. Type Security, and then press ENTER.
8. Select Security, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click Key.
9. Type FileValidation, and then press ENTER.
10. Select FileValidation, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click DWORD Value.
11. Type EnableOnLoad, and then press ENTER. Note: The default value is 0 which disables the validation.
12. On the File menu, click Exit to quit Registry Editor.

Here is a direct link to the website:

http://pariswells.com/blog/fixes/excel- ... work-share

Hope that helps!