I've been facing a strange issue where a small group of users in the Accounting Department are experiencing their PCs locking up when they try to save Excel spreadsheets to their designated shared drives, either for Accounting or Accounts Receivable. We operate in a hybrid environment with M365 and On-Prem solutions via AWS servers. Our setup includes a file server and two domain controllers in AWS, while we have one on-prem DC. Although I'm currently addressing some replication issues within the DCs, I suspect that if it were that severe, more users would be affected. I ruled out a DNS problem as well since not everyone is having this problem. It's just these three specific users, while others in the same department seem unaffected. What could I be overlooking?
4 Answers
Could there be some kind of add-on or plugin in Excel that's causing the lock-ups? Sometimes, those extra features can conflict with shared drives and lead to issues.
I had a similar problem once, and it turned out updating Excel solved everything for me. Have you checked if those users have the latest version installed? Sometimes, updates can fix bugs that lead to freezing.
Could the cause be related to the size of the Excel files? If they're too large or overly complex, it might lead to issues when saving. A spreadsheet that behaves more like a database could definitely cause performance problems. If it seems too big for its purpose, that could be a red flag.
Larger files usually run just fine if they're well-structured, though. So, size alone might not be the issue.
With finance users and Excel, it's worth checking if there are complex multi-sheet lookups happening. Sometimes saving can lock up their PC if other files are trying to update simultaneously. Just a thought!
I didn't consider multi-sheet dependencies. I've asked them about using macros or pivot tables, but they claim it's a simple, flat spreadsheet. The files involved are just monthly-ledger copies filled with new data, but maybe there's still complexity I'm missing.
Isn't M365 supposed to update automatically? They should have the latest version if that's the case.