Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

C:\not\sure\about\the\rest\of\you\but\i\needed\to\see\how\long\that\is\to\fully\understand\the\implications\of\this\seemingly\arbitrary\limitation\-\to\give\this\some\context\this\path\is\two\hundred\and\18\characters\

When i first hard coded MAX_PATH in my program i though the length was reasonable. Now i think 1024 would be better as a really large file name does happen sometimes.<p>Apple has a limit of 1024 apparently( correct me if I&#x27;m wrong )<p>Solution by microsoft: <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-paths-in-net-part-1-of-3-kim-hamilton.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;bclteam&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2007&#x2F;02&#x2F;13&#x2F;long-path...</a>

Let me rant on something here. I work in finance, Excel is my everyday. We do a lot of manual monkey work (copy pasting stuff around a lot), when we &quot;automate&quot;, we use the adamant (can&#x27;t find a better word) VBA.<p>Now, you see how not helpful is this error message? Ok, try that when you are writing a macro in VBA. You literally start regretting the day you were born.<p>Nothing beats Python stack traces...

And TFS can&#x27;t handle path lengths longer than 260 characters.<p>I don&#x27;t want to hear the BS about MAX_PATH. These are really annoying customer-facing flaws that scream &quot;amateur hour&quot;.

It&#x27;s also problematic for enterprises trying to roll out sharepoint. Site addresses tend to be pretty verbose so I can&#x27;t see that playing particularly nicely given this limitation.<p>Extra points also for the super helpful error messages it throws.

Ah.. the old 218 characters in your path problem! Because of course!

The msdn article [1] is a great reference on the strangeness of the Windows path naming conventions.<p>[1] <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;library&#x2F;windows&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;aa36...</a>

This gets even worse when mixed in with emails, I recently bumped heads with the naming limitations as the naming of invoices exceeded the limits and rendered the excel file useless (it &quot;existed&quot;, it would just error if you tried opening it).<p>File name limitation in 75 characters, so now my system renames the file when sending them by email to just the invoiced clients name, and retains the properly formatted one in the folder structure (It&#x27;s a very detailed one following a &quot;&lt;course code&gt;-&lt;course name&gt; &lt;course date from and to&gt; &lt;student name&gt; - &lt;billable company&gt;.xsl&quot; pattern as it revolves around certifications and needs to follow certain regulations, and obviously exceeds 75 characters with ease)

This limitation is obviously put in place to make it easier for the NSA to index your documents

Can&#x27;t load them either, I guess. When I tried to open an Excel file directly from Sparrow I would get a &quot;path longer than xxx&quot; message. Saving it to ~&#x2F;Downloads and then opening it worked just fine.

No surprise here. Long path names have always been a pain on Windows, from not being able to open files to not being able to restore previous versions, backups, etc.<p>Hitting these limits is <i>very</i> common on file servers.

From their page, I offer a suggestion: Things to Try: Increase the maximum path length.<p>Jeez.

It also can&#x27;t open two documents with the same filename in different directories, which comes up a lot more often in my experience...

does this apply to 2013? it is a rank amateur quality of mistake... and has been for quite a long time before 2007, since we lost the constraints on paths in early windows&#x2F;dos land with Windows 95 I think...

Neither can winrar, or was that fixed?

Excel <i>2007</i>.