How to allow Excel 365 to open file paths is longer than 259 characters

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How to allow Excel 365 to open file paths is longer than 259 characters

Joseph Braun 60

We have a user running Microsoft 365 Apps for business - en-us build 16.0.17231.20194 experiencing the identical problem as this 3-year old forum post: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/excel-365-cannot-open-the-file-because-the-file/c3394950-4aa3-433a-bbe4-cdb0c02a32bc?from=ContactUsWebBCQR&CorrelationId=a89cf629-2de1-4e36-a217-b9426813bae3. We hypothesize this is a limit hard-coded into Microsoft 365 as the error appears consistent in Word and Excel, and want to confirm before moving forward. We wish to avoid changing/renaming the file path strings unless this is the only option.

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Answer 1

Emily Du-MSFT 51,836 Microsoft External Staff

Per my knowledge, there is a character limit on creating and saving files in Office products. This issue occurs if the path of the file that you open or save meets the following condition:

Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Access: The total length of the path and the file name, including file name extension, exceeds 259 characters.
Microsoft Excel: The total length of the path and the file name, including file name extension, exceeds 218 characters.

I'm afraid that the limitation cannot be changed now. Really sorry for the inconvenience caused by it.

Until now, the best workaround is to reduce the character count.

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Joseph Braun 60 Reputation points

2024-02-26T14:09:26.9133333+00:00

Hello Emily, Thank you for the response! Internally confirming the issue is enough in this case, as we can inform the customer as to the next best practice.
Marsh 5 Reputation points

2024-05-08T16:45:27.78+00:00

it is a travesty that in 2024 with windows 11 that long file names are still not supported.
even raising the limit to 512 would be a significant sigh of relief. 256 is just way too short and easily reached when your project has a few levels of nesting with highly descriptive filenames.
Ryan Monahan 10 Reputation points

2024-10-25T18:50:15.6+00:00

This is an issue that definitely needs to be resolved. I have a long paths Group Policy on the file server and all workstations, and was wondering why there was still a problem. Please let us all know when Office's internal hardcoding changes to accommodate Win32 long paths.
Fajar Adianto 5 Reputation points

2024-12-02T03:25:39.71+00:00

How is this issue still unresolved? What’s stopping the developers from fixing it? Long file paths work perfectly fine on OneDrive and Microsoft 365 mobile apps, yet the desktop application—supposedly with access to more robust resources—still can’t handle them. It’s baffling and frankly unacceptable at this point.
Dilan 0 Reputation points

2025-02-07T14:37:01.8733333+00:00

I agree with the others. Seems like a design flaw that should have been corrected already.

One workaround I have found is to create a symlink a couple of directories back, and route the user through that instead. The command only works in a cmd prompt (not Powershell) and is something like "mklink /D newlink target"

Works unless it's mapped to a network path.

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How to allow Excel 365 to open file paths is longer than 259 characters

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