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How does Excel determine what user has a file open?

Question

Wednesday, February 10, 2016 7:21 PM

We have a file that, no matter who has it open, always reports the one particular user as being the person that has it open. In other words, say I have 4 people -A, B, C, and D. It doesn't matter whether A, B, C or D have the file open, Excel will always report that person A has the file open. It's reporting the person's full name, so I know it's not using DNS or reverse lookups. I looked in the file at the author / last modified values and those are not it. I checked people's username in the Excel Options -> General tab and the name isn't there.  The only way I can know for sure who has the file open is to go on the file server and use "Share and Storage Management" which actually does show the correct user. How is Excel determining who has the file open? I'm stumped.

Shaun

All replies (3)

Thursday, February 11, 2016 7:13 AM âś…Answered

Hi Shaun,

Based on your description, your environment always display the same user name in use when opening Excel file. Is my understanding correct?

This problem may occur due to lots of reasons. Please first try to show the hidden files in the folder, and see if you can find a file that begins with ~$. If yes, delete it and then try again. Probably, Word previously quit improperly and, therefore, did not delete the owner file.

Then I suggest you refer to this article about locking problem in Excel:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/the_microsoft_excel_support_team_blog/archive/2012/05/14/the-definitive-locked-file-post.aspx

And you want to show the correct name for each Excel file in network, I suggest you try to modify registry manually:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo

"UserName"="user's name"

Hope it's helpful.

Regards,

Emi Zhang
TechNet Community Support

Please mark the reply as an answer if you find it is helpful.

If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact [email protected].


Thursday, February 11, 2016 4:21 PM

Yes, thank you...There was an orphan temp (~) file. Deleted that and working correctly now. Just for other people's reference, I had to show hidden files and show "protected operating system files" to see the temp file.

Shaun


Friday, February 12, 2016 2:34 AM

:D

It's nice to hear you have resolved your problem, if you need more help when using Office products please post your issue to our forum.

We are glad to help and follow up your reply.

Regards,

Emi Zhang
TechNet Community Support

Please mark the reply as an answer if you find it is helpful.

If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact [email protected].