"workbook is currently open by 256 users" Excel spreadsheet

Question

We have a spreadsheet that gets frequent updates by a small group of people. Starting Friday, they were not able to open it with Edit in Office, instead got a popup saying the workbook is open by 256 users, and they can only open it in read-only mode.  There are not 256 users, but I wonder if this is because the spreadsheet is up to version 300+ (many updates!).   Is this correct, and will re-uploading it as a new doc (version 1) fix the problem?    We are running Confluence 4.0.3.

Chris Solgat · Answer

I've found that the 256 users is actually an Excel limitation:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP005199291.aspx?redir=0

My question then goes to, is there a way to find the users that supposedly have an open session with the document and is there a way to kill the connections?  Our document with this error has 422 versions, so I'm not sure that the versions are the answer.  We also have documents with well over 1000 versions, but I cannot say for certain that they were "Edited in Office".

claire.simonson · Answer

off-track, guys.  Let me re-phrase the issue - does Confluence have a limit in how many versions can be tracked when a document is edited using "Edit in Office"?   Aside from the philosophical discussion, this is a technical issue that we have encountered in our use of the product and I could use a concrete answer.  Is the workaround that we found (i.e. re-upload the attachment to start the version tracking over) the only way / the best way to deal with this limitation?  I'm posting it here because I've had trouble trying to enter service tickets, but hope that someone from Atlassian can weigh in. thanks!

Mick Davidson_o2ws6w · Answer

Renjith,

The reason why it's better to use Excel in v4 is because the tables functionality in Confluence (beyond anything rather basic and assuming that you are not using a plugin to improve it) is pretty awful.

For a start, you can't control column sizes, which expand and contract randomly, and that's just the beginning: let's not talk about what happens if you want to print one! :)  Confluence has none of the spreadsheet functionality that Excel has, and that's what most Excel users want. So giving them something they can use makes them happy and is much better than giving them some that does almost nothing other than randomly re-size.

Also, it is often far easier to create a spreadsheet in Excel and paste it into Confluence that build it from scratch in Confluence. Personally I'd much prefer to do everything in Confluence using the built-in functionality, but that isn't always possible - and by built-in, I don't mean having to customise the CSS etc. I'm hoping that tables have improved in 5.3.x.

Cheers.