Okay so I was given a ticket for work, and the problem seems to be that the user is trying to use PowerPoint 2016 to access an older .ppt file over a network share. Every time she does this PowerPoint crashes. But, when she brings the file to her local client it works fine. Does anyone have any ideas on the problem(aside from just have her work on them locally then upload)?
How long is the file name?
Some file shares don’t properly handle long file names (Yes, looking at you MS Swerver with fsck knows what version of SMB enabled) and whilst they look OK, things get munged in translation.
But yeah, tell the luser to copy the file down, work on it locally and copy it back up again. (Then run when all the versioning / two people edit the file and upload their copies separately problems start arriving.)
Is she using Windows 10? One of the recent updates borked a lot of network stuff.
To Viking: Then pptx files name is 18 characters long. Due to this persons position, we are going to accommodate the want to work on the file over the shared drive.
To Nabiki: The user is running windows 10, with office 2016 (as far as I’m aware only a small portion of users here have been moved to 365).
I’m going to test both the length of the file name and os problem.
How long is the file name?
Is this still an issue? To my understanding, it’s because the filename can only be X characters, but for most Windows thing it cares about the entire path, right? So
c:/folder/subfolder/reallyreallylongsubfolder/whyisthishere/thisorganizationalsystemsucks/iamlosingmywilltolive/unsorted/supercalifragilisticexpialidocious/more/more/more/inthemidnighthourshescreams/more/more/more/long/path/to/file/filename.ppt
causes errors if it’s over X characters… X used to be 128, but that was forever ago.
Is this still an issue?
The entire path can’t be more than 255 characters. That’s still a thing.
A Windows 10 update borked something? You don’t say? 
2 Likes
The path length doesn’t seem to be causing the issue.
Ah, Office. A suite of applications that aren’t even compatible with their own recent versions sometimes.
2 Likes
yep that sounds about right
okay so update on the file size. It is 17MB.