If you know the name of the application that had been used to open the file before, you may want to check the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) to see if the application that you had closed is still alive in the Processes tab. Sometimes I called these locked files in mystery because often times you found there is just no reason for them to be in the locked mode and you certainly don’t see any running applications that were holding them off. To unlock a file locked by an application After that, you will be able to deal with the file that was locked before. Then on the right side panel, find the file that is opened by a remote user, right-click on it and choose Close.Ĥ.
Expand Shared Folders, and click on Open Files at the left hand panel in Computer Management.ģ.
MY EXCEL FILE IS LOCKED FOR EDITING BY ME WINDOWS
On Windows 8, you can right-click the Start button to bring up the Power Menu and launch Computer Management straight from there.Ģ. Open Computer Management, by right-clicking My Computer icon and choosing Manage. Note that if your computer doesn’t have a shared folder that is accessible to the remote user, you won’t be able to unlock a file by this method.ġ. And another, the file may be opened and locked by an application that is still actively alive in the background even though it’s been closed by the user. For one, the file might be opened by another user on the same network because the file is part of the shared folder on your computer. There are a few reasons why your file may have been caught in locked position. You often ended up closing all your opened applications and rebooting your computer to clean up the locked handles so that you can deal with these files. Error is kinda nice tells you which computers cant be reached therefore it may be time for a cleanup.Locked files are annoying, especially those locked in mystery as to no reason why they are locked and what has been holding them off.
Although it errors out it just silently continues searching through AD computers. For my example, I used *chrome* which I know is chrome.exe but I wanted to make sure so I used wildcard. This will get you started but you are better off running it overnight as it will take a while any computer located in AD that returns the process open (you choose which one excell is winword) and possibly stuck. Well, I lied here is option 3: by no means is it the quick way but its fun :) We have had it where it says that Susan has the document open but I know she doesn't.
the process winword must be stuck open on someone's computer. The second one does not always work, but its a fighting chance. or send out a restart command overnight to all boxes to sever all ties with a shared network. This is one reason I can't stress that all shared excel files need to be set to 'Shared.' This is pretty common for excel, you have 2 options open it in read-only and copy it to another spreadsheet. The very fact I can rename the file while it is supposedly 'in use' tells me that something is getting quite confused here.Īny ideas what I can do other than reboot the server? The other things i have tried is stop/start the WIndows Search service and rebuild the index. If the file has a different name, it works fine. As soon as I rename the file back to the original name, the same error occurs. I was running out of ideas so decided to copy the file, delete the original and then rename the copied file to the same name as the original. However, there is NO sign of the file being opened. Normally I would just log on the file server, open computer management > Shared folders > Open Files and close the open file. The user stated left the company a long time ago, but in my experience it is not that unusual for Excel/Word to report the incorrect user. A user is reporting that they cannot open an Excel file (on a shared folder) as it is locked for editing by another user.