Success! Conquering Microsoft Update Problems

After a couple of weeks, I have finally figured out what is going on with the “invisible” files. I was starting to feel useless and stupid. A couple of weeks ago, my macro stopped working because it could no longer see the downloaded files from our vendor even though the files were open and appeared to be in editable mode (or not in Protected View). I spent quite a bit of time checking the usual reasons why my macro could not see those files, including some really geeky stuff regarding powershell and zone identifier. All of those “solutions” did not work.

Short Version of Story

So, the short version of my story is that there were two kinds of issues going on, both related to the Microsoft updates:

1. Machines with Office 365 are finding their internet options for Internet Explorer being changed so those options needed to be reset so that the vendor’s software could be used. And…
2. I don’t know for sure, but in one instance, it appeared that Microsoft started offering One Drive when saving the files from our vendor site, but you can’t tell it is One Drive because when saving, the path looks like your desktop unless you are really check the path. It looks like we don’t want to open files from One Drive if we want my macro to work.

Of course, now I’ve been undergoing another set of Microsoft updates the last two weeks. My home machine has been wonky lately. As a matter of fact, today my Word document got hung up and my wi-fi access is currently down, probably because of some attempted updates. (Yep, after checking my Updates and Security setting, I can see that it tried to do some updates today.)

So hopefully, after a couple of times turning on and shutting off my machine a couple of times will bring it back to normal. These updates are a killer.

Now, if I can get my other stuff resolved (such as, right now, my drawing is crap – my current project is just not working out), I will start feeling more capable again.

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Long Version of Story

Following is my long version of my story, spilled out in a verbose fashion:

Lately, Microsoft has been doing some updates and since this summer, those updates have been causing me problems. On my work machine, a couple of months ago, an update left me with a strange message that some “drive” ran out of space. The only thing I could think of was that Microsoft created a “drive” on my machine to temporarily store stuff for updates. So now I get this strange message every time I start up the machine telling me that this “drive” is running out of space. The message doesn’t go away until I click on it and a box appears, at which time, I shut down the box. And the message goes away for that day, only to come back up the next day.

It was also a couple months ago I started to have problems with certain macros that previously worked before but now do not work so well. So it feels like Microsoft are doing something during their updates.

My end users, the managers, are also seeing updates and sometimes those updates lead to problems with my macro.

One set of issues concerns machines that use Office 365. A few weeks ago, some of those, maybe all, who uses Office 365 started to have the same problem. These managers were able to use the macro up until a few weeks ago and they were still using their old machines (in other words, they hadn’t gotten a new machine in the interim). So something just suddenly changed and upon discussion, I learned that their machines may have undergone a Microsoft update. One of the managers was sharp eyed and noticed that the downloads from our vendors were being saved with a different name. On the vendor’s side, the naming convention was correct at the point of saving but on the machine itself, the name ended up changed, so you don’t really notice the name change unless you really looked at the names on the machine. When the manager mentioned the name change, it made me wonder if the internet options had been changed. When we use our vendor’s software on their site, we have to make sure the internet options for the browser are set up properly in order for their software to work. We went through the internet options on the Internet Explorer browser and found that some had changed. Once we corrected those options, the renaming of files stopped and the program started working again.

There was a second issue that was even more problematic though because this manager did not use Office 365. Her problem actually started before the Office 365 and I was worried I was going to have to do her report for her. But after looking at various possibilities (I think we had 3 1 hour long sessions to try to resolve this problem), we finally started to notice that her files also had different names too, but in a very different way. When you open the first file, the naming convention was correct but then later, when you try to open the other downloads, you find that all of the files had different/weird spelling. The whole thing was just bizarre because when you first open them, the name would be correct but once open, they were incorrect. Then after looking at it with stunned stupidifcation, I realized that these files had been saved to One Drive. But, when we were downloading the files from our vendor’s site, it looked like we were saving to the desktop.

I don’t know, but it looks like Microsoft offers up its One Drive – but without telling you it’s One Drive – it looks like your C drive. And then once you start using files from One Drive, in its open state, the name of the file changes (I know that is weird and quite contrary to what usually happens but that is what it appears to be happening) and my program cannot see the file because my program is looking for specific filenames.

So I did two things: first make sure the internet options were set properly and then worked on setting up a specific folder on the C Drive for the manager to save to. I’m hoping that since she is now aware that Microsoft may be offering up One Drive, she will work on finding the specific folder we created for her. She is going to have to be very careful about where she saves her files.