Working from removable media has always been a dodgy exercise when
using Excel or any Office product.
Excel creates a temporary file when when you open a workbook. If you
open from removable media that's where the temp file will be.
Excel just hates to let go of that temp file and loss of data and file
corruption can occur readily.
For this reason only the brave or foolhardy will attempt to work
directly from anything but HD.
Thanks.
I was just trying an experiment.
I have Office 97 on my desktop, and rarely use Excel, but a third-party
program converts output from another program to Excel 97 format, and I found
it quite useful.
My wife bought Office 2010, home and student edition (which lacks MS Access),
and it is installed on her laptop and mine. So for my experiment I took the
file in Excel 97 format from my desktop machine (it made no objection to my
removing the disc) to the laptop on a DVD RW disc, and opened it in Excel
there. I thought I'd look at in the new format, so did a "save as". I was a
bit disconcerted that it deleted the original file - normally "save as"
creates a new file, and leaves the old one alone. I was impressed that Excel
2010 made a data file about a third the size of the Excel 97 version - about
550 Kb instead of 1,5 Mb - though Open Office made one smaller still.
But having done that, I could not remove the disc. I had closed Excel, saved
the file, and wanted to take the disc back to my desktop machine, but the disc
would not eject. That's bad behaviour in my book! No well-designed program
should do that. When you close the program, it should flush its buffers and
quit. Excel apparently doesn't. Not even when you shut down!
You could try Open Office.
Price is right but will cost you some time to download, install and
experiment.
I have it installed, and am experimenting with both it and Office 2010 (which
is different enough from 97 to be a completely different program).
But if I can try your patience with one more thing...
I've not had problems with flash drives, though I use them every day to copy
frequently-used data files from my desktop machine to my laptop and back
again. My wife gets nervous because I don't use the release thingy, but that's
because I use batch filesw to do the copying, and don't open files on the
flash drive. When the file is copied, it's copied.
My wife works as an accountant at an NGO, and does a lot of work in Excel 2007
there. One of the auditors asked asked to look at a file, so my wife gave her
the flash drive, and the auditor looked at it, and then removed the flash
drive without closing the program, first. We both know that that is a no-no,
and the result was that not only was the Excel file corrupt, but so were half
the files on the flash drive, and in the end we had to reformat it.
So we are well aware that removing a flsh drive when a program on the computer
has a file open on it can have serious consequences. But then my wife found
problems in releasing the flash drive from her home machine, even when no
program is open. So it seems that Excel 2010 is the culprit, and Excel 2007
(which she has at work) doesn't exhibit this kind of behaviour.
Since Open Office seems much better behaved, and opens MS Office files and
saves them in the same format, I might suggest that my wife switch to that.
The reason I installed OO on my computers was that it would open and let me
work on .docx files that people sent me, which MS Word 97 couldn't handle. It
was easier than sending the file back and asking people to send it again in
..rtf or something.
I'm not much of a user of spreadsheets, but my wife uses them all the time,
and the things we have seen since installing Excel 2010 are a bit worrying.
