OT: File compatibility issues with LAN drive

"Not a ZIP File". When clicking an *.XLS file

I know it's not an application. Harumph.

ok. The drive is a Western Digital MyBook and

with a Linux file server? Any fixes? It's not

Are you using a URL? or is the drive mapped? Cheers

"Not a ZIP File". When clicking an *.XLS file

Well, I know it's not an application. Harumph.

ok. The drive is a Western Digital MyBook and

with a Linux file server? Any fixes? It's not

It's just mapped.

I was just sent an "xlsx" file. Google says it's some MicroShit perversion of XML and ZIP. My Excel 97 won't open it. Is there a way to make it Excel 97 compatible and should I just send it back, "Refused, Return to Sender" ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

You could try renaming it "xls" and then open. Might work if they didn't use some fancy new (and usually unnecessary) features.

Not if it's XML inside like Jim believes -- completely different file structure from traditional Excel .XLS files. (XML is generally ASCII readable; it's just a somewhat more generic markup language than, e.g., HTML...)

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Jim,

Try the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint 2007 file formats. Available on MS download center

Eric Tappert

PS - I know it works as some of my students have more recent software than I do...

Thanks. Download stalled so I'll try again later. Do you think it's clean, no nasty add-ons in there?

Aha! Seems to require people to have MS-Office and _not_ OpenOffice. Why am I not surprised?

Tried that first thing... didn't work :-(

...Jim Thompson

That format postdates Excel 97. Its Micosoft's 'Open XML' format (an attempt to unseat Open Office formats) and probably isn't supported by anything other than the latest Office (per)version.

XL97 is a bit long in the tooth. Buy a copy of XL2003 while you still can and at a good price. Last good version. XL2007 is a crock of overpriced sh*t. Graph charting for even modest amounts of data 10x slower than 2003.

Various third parties have readers that will convert XL2007 format files XLSX etc (incidentally this has compiled XL VBA macros in it - assume hostile intent unless you really trust the sender). MS doesn't do a stand alone reader for it, but has a backwards compatibility kit for more recents XLs to open it.

Try for example Google with XLSX and one of eg

Don't let any macros run though just in case.

Regards, Martin Brown

"Joerg" skrev i en meddelelse news:ygm3j.21507$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr14.news.prodigy.net...

If you use NFS you probably have a corruption problem i.e. Network Failure System operating as designed ;-).

If it is SMB/Samba - the drive appears as it would do in windows maybe one of the network ports inbetween is flipping between 10 & 100 MB because autodetect does not work. Again corrupting data. SMB generally works on a good network - WiFi is *crap* BTW.

In general it is not a good idea to pull files over the network, unzip and push back per file (or compile). At work we hit periods of strange behaviour doing that so we pull the entire build tree using scp, uncompress, build, compress, push back to file server.

Thanks, that could be. To be honest I don't know which file system it uses. I was hoping not NTFS. Oh well.

Data doesn't get corrupted. Even super-large files are perfectly ok. It's just that the PC wants to start them as an application while it treats local files with same extension as data files and launches them correctly into (and not as) an application.

I usually don't either. But if you have an xls file with, say, a math calculation on the LAN drive and you want to take a quick look it does get old to always have to pull it.

It sounds like a problem with 'name mangling' in the Samba configuration of the server. There are numerous settings in a Samba configuration that control how file names (and permission bits) are mapped between the Linux file system and Windows.

If your server is a 'network appliance' there may be nothing you can do, but if you can play around with the Samba configuration files (shell root access), you might be able to change this behavior.

Maybe it's a file name length issue with the NFS implementation. If the path + filename length is greater than a user defined or default length (255 characters I believe), then perhaps it's getting truncated or otherwise mucked up, or the error is not being handled correctly.

Can you try copying or renaming one of the suspect files to a short length name and placing it in a top level directory on the drive?

Guess I'll have to live with it then. Western Digital allows users precious little access :-(

I bought some CAD software here:

Didn't work :-(

When calling the file from within an application everything is fine. When clicking the files it errors, the local PC fails to launch the application registered for that file extension.