Comments on: The File Cannot Be Accessed

By: Yi-Hsuan Wu

Yi-Hsuan Wu — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:49:00 +0000

I had the exact same error message except of course the name of the file showed in the message was different. I tried to find the macro.add file but couldn’t locate in the folder. Later, I found out that in my case, it was a bad link in the icon panel. I use macro quite often, so I pulled an icon out to the panel so I can just click on it. It has been working without any problem. But the error message started to show up. However, I can still access the macro through the drop down manu. I guess I can just recreate an icon for the macro later.

By: Jim Witte

Jim Witte — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:57:00 +0000

I managed to find the cause, at least to my problem: I moved the ‘Macro.add’ alias file (found in [Office X directory]/Office/Startup/Excel), and the problem went away. The Macro.add file is the only one there in the Excel directory, and the original file doesn’t seem to exist, so I just removed the entire Excel directory, and I don’t get the error anymore.

Maybe Excel tries to open the Macro.add file, and reports that it can’t be accessed when the alias doesn’t resolve? A better solution IMO would be to check to see if the alias resolves first – if it doesn’t, alert the user to the SPECIFIC cause of the error (instead of the generic ‘this file canot be accessed’ – “Which file!? I’m not trying to open a file?”), and then either delete the nonfunctional alias file, or recreate whatever the Macro.add file is, and where-ever it originally is. But, this is MS we’re talking about – user-friendlyness especially in border cases like this (this must not happen all that often) do not exactly seem to be a concern.

By: Jim Witte

Jim Witte — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:46:00 +0000

I was getting this on OSX Excel (10.1.5 on MacOSX 10.4.10 Intel), so I tried opening Excel itself (no file), and *still* got the error. This leads me to think that it's something about a template file somewhere? Any ideas where? I got rid of the original 'MS Office ACL [English]', 'Excel Settings (10)', and 'Microsoft Office Settings (10)' files, and the problem still occurs (the second and third files are recreated, but not the 'ACL' file). I then tried renaming the ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft folder (which was recreated), and the problem *still* happened.

Any ideas short of a full reinstall?

Jim
j(witte)swi(NO SPAM)tte@blooming(trees)ton.(dot)in(diana).us

(This is a 'hairy RFC 2822 Address'..)

By: fzz

fzz — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:08:00 +0000

I'd guess the 218 characters have something to do with mapped drive to UNC paths. Like X: mapped to

\andnowforsomethingcompletelydifferent

That is, I'm guessing that Excel and maybe other Office programs either store UNC pathnames or insist on making provision for them.

By: Nicholas Hebb

Nicholas Hebb — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 02:25:00 +0000

I noticed the same last week when testing whether Unicode characters worked in filenames. I thought it was odd too, but the thing that stood out the most was the last line. I’ve always used a MAX_PATH constant of 260. Why does the error message state 218?