Not sure if this is an Excel problem or a more generic Windows problem, but thought I'd post here first.
Have a number of users who are complaining that they cannot open an Excel file on our company's intranet (but some of their colleagues can). When they click on the link, they get the normal Open/Save/Cancel dialog box and if they choose Open, Excel starts but it just shows what looks like a blank spreadsheet. The only clue that it is not a new workbook is that the title bar at the top does show the correct file name, the worksheet is completely white (row and column numbers appear, but there are no gridlines, like every cell has been coloured white), plus the only tab at the bottom of the screen has the same name as the file - which is weird, because the actual spreadsheet should have four tabs and none of them are named after the filename.
However, if they choose the Save option from the dialog box and save the file to their desktop, then open it from there, the spreadsheet opens fine. That is obviously a good workaround, but these users want to see the issue fixed permanently as it seems to be affecting more people.
The only other things I've noticed are that when the Open/Save/Cancel dialog box appears, it says the file is 75KB, but when you choose Open, the resulting file (according to File - Info - Properties in Excel) is only 3.5KB. Also, if you choose Save As from
Excel, the default 'Save as type' for this file is *.htm, instead of *.xls as you'd expect - does this point to these PCs mistaking the spreadsheet for a web page possibly? When the file is saved to desktop, the file size is correct and Save As comes up with
.xls as default.
Users are all using Windows 7 64-bit, Office 2010 64-bit and IE8 (our intranet doesn't work with anything newer), but the same goes for the users who don't have this problem. The file is .xls, not .xlsx, in case this makes a difference.
Any ideas?