We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
Forum Discussion
Files Open as Read-Only?
I am using Dropbox desktop App on my Mac (home) and PC (work). On the Mac (OSX latest version and Office 2011) everything works fine. But on my PC (Windows 7 Pro, Office 2010) files open as Read Only. If I go to Properties and uncheck "read only" for the file or folder in question, it is fine. But when I reboot, all my Dropbox files once again default to "read only". Can you help?
wrote:
I don't understand why when I open a file - it asks me at the top if I want to enable editing. Which I DO! so I click on it. But after i have closed the document and reopened it the edits I have made have gone. Does anyone know how you save edits on Dropbox withoutmoving a file/document out of dropbox every time?I have the same problem in my smart phone. After I make a change in an excel file, I have to save a copy. Then delete the original. That is the solution I found.
I am having the same problem with my Mac. I imported a bunch of files into dropbox and now excel insists on trying to open them all read only. if I move the file out of the dropbox folder, it opens fine. It is only in the dropbox folder that it screws up.
OK. For me the update caused no problem. It worked fine on my Mac at home but accessing the same files on my PC at work gave me the read only problem.
- Does your files contain a forward slash in it's file name? If so, try removing it and see if that helps, worked like a charm for me at least.
- How bizarre. Worked perfectly!
I am seeing alot of questions here, but not many solutions. Does dropbox not participate in this Forum Why doesn't Dropbox state this as a problem and provide an FAQ fix. I am just thinking of forgetting DropBox altogether and going to OneDrive
I am having the same problem with my dropbox files - but not on a mac. I have unchecked the whole dropbox folder, unchecked individual folders, given administrator permissions and tried every which way to correct it, but each time I open the program I am told the files are read only.
I have tried restarting the computer - and this time was told that Windows Firewall blocked some aspects of Dropbox. I checked that it should be allowed through.
Then tried again to change the read only designation, but without success. I even tried the advanced mode and unchecked the other choices (archiving and searching) but it made no difference. Even though I give admin permissions, when I look again they are back to being read only.I saved my excel files from my MacBook Pro OS X 10.10.5 to DropBox. Now when I open either in DropBox or save to my desk top I can Read Only. Will not allow me to make changes. Help! This just started after my update to OS X 10.10.5. How do I fix this?
Thank you...that makes sense...although it's a bit of a pain! Because I assume you then have to go through the whole process of uploading the file and also remember to dump the old one. But again, thank you for explaining!
@Normek Industriservice AS - YES!! I tried everyone elses complicated solutions and the fix was as simple as removing the forward slash - TRY THIS FIRST
SOLVED:
I found that the reason for 'read only' was my Mac was saving as 'nameOfDocument.doc' and my PC was saving as 'nameOfDocument.docx.
Note that they are different file formats. (.doc and .docx)
Please upvote if this works for you. So people don't need to spend as long as us ;)
