Excel export to desktop fails, but not when exporting to C drive

August 5, 201114 yr

This is a weird one I've never seen before.

I've got one user who is running FMP 11 on a Windows 7 computer. My FM solution is hosted with FileMaker Server 11 Advanced.

I was showing the user how to export data from FileMaker into Excel. The first set of exports were all scripted, and the legacy procedure from back in the day was that I set it to export to the C:/FileMaker folder (this was before you could GetDesktopPath and I never changed the code because it is working).

I then showed her creating custom reports and walked her through exporting to her desktop. I watched her select file type .xls, but while the export was running it said it was exporting to .tab. I thought that odd and sure enough, it created a .tab document. My first thought was that she just missed (which doesn't really make sense since .tab is not next to .xls) so I had her try again. Same result. A third try got the same result. I had her try .xlsx and the same thing happened.

I thought maybe there was some strangeness with her FM account, so I logged in with my account but it didn't make a difference.

I had noted that she was running FMP 11.0v2 so I thought maybe applying the patch would help. After patching to v3 I tried again. Same result. So, I uninstalled FM and reinstalled, patching again. Same result.

I then stepped through several other formats, including .csv, .dbf, and .mer. All worked as expected. On a whim, I tried exporting to the C:/FileMaker folder and it worked perfectly every time whether creating .xls or .xlsx. So, it isn't a problem with the conversion to Excel format and also explains why the scripted exports were working.

I also noted that if I manually change the file extension from .tab to .xls the file opens immediately without asking about converting so I think it is actually creating the Excel file just applying the wrong extension. Since then, I have tried the exports on several other computers running both Windows 7 and Windows XP and the issue does not occur.

So, what I'm left with is one computer that cannot properly export to Excel format if you're trying to export to the desktop. Not a huge deal, but still very strange and bugging me so I wanted to see if anyone else has seen that happen. A web search didn't turn up anything.