You may receive a "Your changes could not be saved" error message when you try to save a file to a network drive in Excel

Symptoms

When you save a Microsoft Excel workbook file on a network drive and you do not have both Modify and Delete rights for the folder where you are saving the file, you may experience one of the following symptoms:

• When you save a new workbook file to the network drive, you receive an error message that is similar to the following

  Your changes could not be saved to
  'BOOK1.XLS', but were saved to a temporary document named '4CCA4100'. Close the existing document, then open the temporary document and save it under a new name.

  where
  4CCA4100 is a random eight-character alphanumeric string, and BOOK1.XLS is the name of the file you are saving.

• When you save an existing workbook file to the network drive, the file appears to be saved with the name you typed in the
  Save dialog box. However, when you open this file again from the network, your changes do not appear in the file. The file is actually saved to the network drive with a random file name that contains numbers and letters, such as 4CCA4100.

These symptoms only occur if you save a file in the Excel Workbook or Template format.

Cause

This issue occurs if Excel cannot delete the original file or cannot rename the temporary file so that the save operation cannot successfully finish. If Excel cannot delete the existing file because you lack Delete rights, both the original file and the temporary file remain in the destination folder. If Excel can delete the existing file or if you are saving a file for the first time, but Excel cannot rename the temporary file because you lack Modify rights, only the temporary file is saved in the destination folder.

Note Third-party antivirus and replication software may also cause this issue. To verify that you do not have the rights on the network to modify or delete a file, try to rename or delete the file on the network drive from Windows Explorer. If you cannot rename or delete the file from Windows Explorer, you cannot save a file to this drive from Excel.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, notify your network administrator that you need Delete and Modify rights for the appropriate folder on the network drive. You must have Delete and Modify rights to save an Excel workbook file with the correct file name to the folder.

Workaround

To temporarily work around this issue until you have rights on the destination folder, try the following methods:

• Save your workbook files to your local hard disk, or to a folder where you have Modify and Delete rights. You may then be able to copy the file to the network drive where you do not have Modify or Delete rights.

• If you have an antivirus program installed either on your computer or on the network server, turn off or remove the antivirus program, and then test to determine if the issue still occurs. Some antivirus programs may interfere with the save process in Excel.
  
  Note You may want to contact the maker of your antivirus program to see if an there is an updated version that resolves the save issue in Excel.

References

For more information about the way that Excel saves files, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

814068 Description of the way that Excel saves files

For more information about how to troubleshoot errors that you receive when you save files in Excel, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

271513 How to troubleshoot errors when you save Excel files