This is weird...
By Toby Allen
Thursday, September 26, 2002
I've noticed recently, and maybe I'm behind the times, but Excel refuses to open two documents with the same name!!!!
Thats really weird. The filesystem can deal with files of the same name (obviously not in the same directory), Word can deal with it, Wordpad can deal with it. Most Applications on the planet can deal with opening two files that have the same name (in different directories), but not excel.
If you try to open a second document with the same name you get this.
but this is extradordinary. The same happens if you try and save a file with the same name as a file you have open.
I know what you're wondering. How did Toby come across this and why does it bother him? I tend to create todo.xls files for my programming projects, to keep track of what I still need to do. Once I tried to open two of them together and this was what I got. I'd be interested to know if anyone knows the reason for this. I'll try and ask Joel.
16 October 2002
Reply from Joel:
"I think it's because when you have an external reference (of the form foo.xls!A1) they only had 8 bytes in the data structure to store the file name. It's kind of shocking that 10 years later nobody has fixed this, but I guess it's not as important as putting in the paperclip, and taking out the paperclip."
So there you go, and I thought there would be a good technical, complicated, excusable reason!