Station Roster Can’t Open – “already open”
Q: I am trying to create a Station Roster spreadsheet and it keeps telling me that “I can’t create this spreadsheet because it is already open right now in Excel.” But nothing is open in excel. Any suggestions?
A: That is an odd message that isn’t explaining exactly what’s going on. It is easy to fix. You need to have read and write access to the default merge folder where the Reporter saves reports. You can set that folder location in Preferences:
In the Reporter | File menu | Preferences | Screen tab | Folder for merge files and report files.
Solution
You can
(a) get the permissions changed on the current folder or
(b) change the folder location to a shared folder or another folder where you know you have full read and write access.
To change the default folder where reports are saved, either
(a) type in the path or
(b) click the little yellow folder Browse Button on the right to navigate to another folder on your computer or network.
Discussion
Users need full rights to:
- Data folder (and its interior folders)
- Program folder
- User’s temp folder
- User’s Documents folder
On rare occasions a user has not had full access to her own documents folder. The more likely scenario for a folder access problem is when there are multiple users of the Reporter database(s) on a single computer. In that circumstance, the folder for merge and report files ought to be set to a shared folder. This is because when the Reporter is installed it sets the default path for that folder to the currently logged in user’s own documents folder. When other people login they do not have access to that folder.
- Every workstation user needs full read / write access to the Reporter’s data folder and theShared Documents folder (inside the Data folder).
- Each user also needs full access to the Reporter’s Program folder, usually on C:\.
- [Reporter | Help menu | About the Volunteer Reporter | Program Folder / Data Folder.]
- Each user needs full access to their own temp folder. [See Temp Folder]
- In addition, for reports, users need full access to the user’s Documents folder (Folder for merge files…) or else the Reporter needs to be pointed to a folder to which they do have full rights.
- [Reporter | File menu | Preferences | Screen tab | Folder for merge files and report files.]