Opening/saving Microsoft 365/Office documents

Welcome to the 1990 !!! 🎉🕺

As of April 2024, Microsoft 218 365, AKA Microsoft Office, doesn't support opening or saving files where the total path length is above 218 or 259 characters

From the following page, retrieved in April 2024:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-suite-issues/error-open-document#cause

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.

This limit includes the three characters that represent the drive, the characters in folder names, backslash characters between folder names, and the characters in the file name itself.

Ignore their "solutions" from that page.

Short term solution

First, try renaming file if it something long (to something like "a.xlsx")

If it is is still too long for Excel to open it:

Right-click on a folder containing the file, and choose:

Mount folder as new drive letter

This will make a new dummy drive (example M:) so open it from the sidebar and find that Excel file there (Something like M:\MyExcelFile.xlsx)

Note that this IS the same folder as the original, just "substituted", so if you do something with that file in there, the same will happen to it in the original folder

Once you are finished with it, you can Eject that virtual drive

Long term solution:

Shorten the total path by renaming all preceding folder names to something short. Name all future folders containing Office files with short names and don't create too many nested folder-with-a-folder structures.

Permanent solution (not possible in all companies):

Look for alternatives for Word, Excel, PowerPoint that is made after 1990. 

(Sorry Microsoft, but you deserve the mock as this is unacceptable in the age of 6-GHz computers and Artificial Intelligence)

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free and support Microsoft Office file formats... but I didn't test if they support long paths.