The Definitive 'Locked File' Post (updated 6/28/2012)

re: The Definitive 'Locked File' Post (updated 6/28/2012)

Also Tired — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:10:15 GMT

I appreciate the time and work various people have invested in trying to find solutions for this problem, but Tired Support Guy is right on. With all the people at Microsoft and resources available, why is it 'they' have been unable to fix this? This has been a problem costing a lot of hours and frustration and lost productivity to customers for at least 5 years and multiple versions of both Windows OS and Excel. After all, did they not write the code to begin with? Is the new mantra just to see how difficult they can make the software to use? I'd let it go, if I could find real answers...

re: The Definitive 'Locked File' Post (updated 6/28/2012)

Tired support guy — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 02:03:14 GMT

Thanks for at least tackling and providing some insight.

Sad though that this is another example of a tech going all technical on why the problem exists as if that makes everything OK.

This is broke and needs fixing. Customers don't care why the problem exists they just want it to go away.

re: The Definitive 'Locked File' Post (updated 6/28/2012)

Hagalaz70 — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:40:34 GMT

To put it in a short way: There is no complete solution for this problem. We should let lose the idea that we will be able to completely get rid of this notification.

I will try to explain why.

If you take a look into this blog, you will see that we have a lot of possible causes and in the author provides you for all of the causes a solution or workaround.

But since the file can be locked by so many different processes, we will never be able to solve the locking issue a 100%.

For example, if you disable the antivirus software and it seems that this solves you issue, doesn’t mean, that a certain moment the error message (or is it a notification?) will appear again. Simply, because your file is locked by another process.

What we are trying to achieve by following the action plan in the blog is to minimize the possibility of getting this notification “File is locked”.

Why do we get the message in the first place?

Whenever you are opening an Excel file, Windows will grant a handle for the file to the Excel.exe. While you are working, there a number of processes that are checking the file from time to time. This can be the antivirus software or this can be a synchronization process of the operating system (e.g. backup or offline folder synchronization), which will make sure that all you edited data will be correctly saved, virus checked, or backed up later. These other processes are notified by Windows when there are changes to the file and they then attempt to get a handle to the file themselves. At times when Excel temporarily unlocks the file for a few milliseconds, which can for example happen when the file is being saved, other processes might get a chance to grab the file lock and hold it locked even though Excel tries to get hold of it quickly again, resulting in a sharing violation that is then presented to the user as the described alert, if the sharing violation condition cannot be immediately resolved after a few retries. This can also be caused by the Preview pane in Windows explorer, since the preview in the explorer is actually starting an instance of Excel.exe, which means the file is already opened for generating the preview picture while the full instance of Excel is trying to open the file for editing.

The only potential solution to this problem would be to stop and somehow prevent other background processes from getting a handle lock on a file if the user is about to open it for editing, but this approach would require fundamental new features in the operating system and at the same time changes in the behavior of the background process applications and services. For the moment being, there is no way to avoid such situations completely, and the suggestions and the action plan in the blog can help to minimize the likelihood of such an unwanted event, but the users also need to be aware that this can still happen from time to time and know how to resolve it by manually retrying the operation.

I hope that clarifies a bit more the case and sets the expectations a bit better.

re: The Definitive 'Locked File' Post (updated 6/28/2012)

Naeem — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:28:45 GMT

I tried everything mentioned on this article, but the issue still there. I have server 2008 R2 SP1 server and windows 7 client.

re: The Definitive 'Locked File' Post (updated 6/28/2012)

Knuckle-Dragger — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:29:53 GMT

Thanks for the post, just found this.

re: The Definitive 'Locked File' Post

Mickyj.com — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:19:14 GMT

Very thorough. Nice !