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Forum Discussion
Problem working with Excel on Dropbox
Hi, I have a problem with Excel files. They works if saved in the pc but the same file in Dropbox said that is impossible to open cause it is not found. Thank you for helping me.
Thanks for that LauraP1!
The issue you're experiencing may be due to a limitation of the applications that you're using to open or save the files in question. In short, there are files that your applications can't process correctly because they have file paths that are too long.
This behavior is present 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.
As an example 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.
The Dropbox desktop application can read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters, which means that files will sync to and from those locations, however, the applications used to open or save said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, Etc.) might not support reading from or writing to these locations with long file paths and may show error messages when trying to open, save or edit them. This is out of our control since the application developers would have to add support for long paths to resolve the issue.
You should be able to resolve the issues with your applications processing these files by simply renaming the file to a shorter name, renaming a folder to a shorter name, or reducing the number of sub-folders.
Keep me posted on your progress!
Walter
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThanks for that LauraP1!
The issue you're experiencing may be due to a limitation of the applications that you're using to open or save the files in question. In short, there are files that your applications can't process correctly because they have file paths that are too long.
This behavior is present 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.
As an example 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.
The Dropbox desktop application can read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters, which means that files will sync to and from those locations, however, the applications used to open or save said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, Etc.) might not support reading from or writing to these locations with long file paths and may show error messages when trying to open, save or edit them. This is out of our control since the application developers would have to add support for long paths to resolve the issue.
You should be able to resolve the issues with your applications processing these files by simply renaming the file to a shorter name, renaming a folder to a shorter name, or reducing the number of sub-folders.
Keep me posted on your progress!
Thank you Walter,
because Dropbox considers the file name lenght not as it appears (as it was saved in C) but considers the full path, correct?
