bug report: document path-length limit in excel 2004

[Raoul Schaffner]

dear mactopia, mac bu and excel dev team,

i'd like to report a bug in excel 2004 that is reproducible on several
machines in our institute.

setup:
powermac g5 with mac os x 10.4.4
microsoft office 2004 11.2.1

excel seems to have a limitation concerning the path-length of a
document. i tested this in two ways. first, the bug reared its ugly
head when copying a chart from a workbook and pasting it into a word
document. depending on the path-length of the source document, excel
would hang upon the paste command in word, subsequently also hanging
word (to the point of me having to force quit both).

further testing showed that this has nothing to do with either word or
the copy/paste functionality. it's based on how excel accesses the
document's data, apparently.

my second test was this: on the desktop, create a folder
"12345678901234567_20" with a subfolder "12345678901234567_20" with a
subfolder "12345678901234567_20"... etcetera, you get the point, until
the path length reaches around 190 characters (including the
"/User/<username>/Desktop" part). next, create a workbook in excel and
save it to the innermost folder. close the file, reopen it and save as
new file with the filename-length increased by one character...
repeat... until excel says:

"Document not saved"

i tested this on two machines and got different maximum path lengths
for this error to occur. however, when taking the harddisk's name and
the username into account, the numbers match: 219

if the document's path-length is 220 or more, excel can no longer save
it and probably can not read data from it during the copy/paste
operation. the latter is just a guess, tho. the former is definitely
reproducible.

if this is a known bug, i'm sorry i have bothered you. if not, please
fix it in the next release.


thank you for your attention,
raoul schaffner.




°°°
Raoul Schaffner
Eawag
Informatik
Überlandstrasse 133
Postfach 611
8600 Dübendorf
Schweiz
Telefon +41 (0)44 823 5548
Telefax +41 (0)44 823 5210
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.eawag.ch

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Raoul,

It's not just Excel. Every application and operating system has a
document path-length limitation of some sort.

If you peruse the newsgroups you will find that most folks will tell you
that Excel's path-length maximum including the file extension is 256
characters. You will also find other numbers cited for Excel such as 218.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=excel+path+length+maximum&hl=en

To make your life easier, a rule of thumb to remember is that with any
file you're pushing your luck if the path name exceeds 200 characters.

And if you make web pages, that goes for you, too! URLs longer than 200
characters are just asking for trouble.

-Jim