Excel 2019 worksheets will not open from within Teams, while via Office 365 premium it works fine

Question

Excel 2019 worksheets will not open from within Teams, while via Office 365 premium it works fine

Alig69 1

We recently purchased some volume licence versions of Office 2019 for my charity. We also have a few subscription based Microsoft 365 Business Standard versions too. For one user I removed their Microsoft 365 Business Standard version and installed Office 2019 via the Office Distribution Tool and its fiddly setup.

All was good until the user tried to open one of her normal Excel spreadsheets via her Teams using the Open in Desktop App button. Then we got the following error

On the face of it this looks like a long filename error, and indeed it may be related to long filepaths. The bit gets me is that opening the same file works perfectly well using Microsoft 365 Business Standard version of Excel in the same manner. It has me stumped. It only appears to affect Excel 2019, as similar Word documents in the same Teams folder opened via Word 2019 in the same way work just fine. I've also tried this on several computers and have the same issue on them when using Excel 2019, but not Excel 365, so its not confined to this one computer.

Anyone any ideas why both versions are behaving differently? Both are on Windows 10 64bit 1903, both are 64bit versions of Excel, see below:

I have tried enabling long filenames in group policy on the computer, plus compared lots of the settings within Excel against both versions, but no joy. Any insights would be greatly appreciated

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Answer 1

JimmyYang-MSFT 58,646 Moderator

Hi @Alig69 ,

Does this issue persist all the time?

Can you open your excel file normally via Teams web client?

Can you upload excel file to Microsoft Teams?

According to your error message, we recommend you make sure the path to the file contains fewer than 219 characters, you can try to rename the file name or move the file to a folder with a shorter path name.

In addition, you can try to repair your Office program for Office 2019 Click-to-Run installation.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/excel-opens-blank#for-an-office-365-or-office-2019-click-to-run-installation

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Alig69 1 Reputation point

2020-10-23T14:56:38.157+00:00

Thanks for your reply.

Yes it does persist. I can indeed shorten some of the paths and it then works fine. The trouble is it has been working fine with 365 Standard (subscription office) w, so my concern is as to why the two versions of Office are behaving differently when essentially they are the same product.

I can open the xlsx in Teams fine, in both scenarios, its only in Excel 2019 via 'Open in Desktop App' it doesn't work once the path goes over the limit. It makes me think there is a setting somewhere enabled for Excel 365, but not enabled for Excel 2019. I don't want users to change directory names unless there is absolutely no way around this and the fact it all works fine in one 64 bit version, but not another is troubling
JimmyYang-MSFT 58,646 Reputation points Moderator

2020-10-30T08:44:54.2+00:00

Hi @Alig69 ,

I made a discussion with our office engineer. From the view of Office, there is no special settings to allow the two versions of Office to have this behavior.

If you can download the document and open it normally, we recommend you try to clean the cache files in Office Upload Center. You can click settings and delete cache files here.
Alig69 1 Reputation point

2020-11-02T09:07:09.877+00:00

I will give that go and let you know, thanks
Alig69 1 Reputation point

2020-11-02T09:29:28.39+00:00

Gave it a go, and still exactly the same sadly
JimmyYang-MSFT 58,646 Reputation points Moderator

2020-11-05T06:44:32.703+00:00
Hi @Alig69 ,

At present, i did not find any effective solution to change these two behaviors. As we said above, it seems related to your version of Excel application. In this case, there are only two workarounds for you:

Replace your excel 2019 to Excel Office 365.

make sure the path to the file contains fewer than 219 characters when using Excel 2019.

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Excel 2019 worksheets will not open from within Teams, while via Office 365 premium it works fine

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