Issue with Excel for Mac with VBA code

This is my first time posting on this forum, and I'm not sure if this is the correct place to put this. Apologies in advance if it is not.


I’m hoping someone here could help me. I’ve created a Macro-Enabled Excel workbook for using on Excel for Mac & Windows. I released the first version of the file publicly back in November, and for most people, it is working fine. However, a few people on Mac are reporting an issue that I cannot reproduce on any of the Mac’s I have access to. Thus, I am struggling to figure out what’s causing it.


One of the things the workbook does is save a separate Excel file on the user’s computer in a very specific folder, the first time the file is opened on that computer. For a few people, when this moment occurres, the VBA code in the workbook generates an error.


Run-time error ‘1004’: Method ‘SaveAs’ of object ‘_Workbook’ failed.


It does not appear that this error occurs on Excel for Mac 2011. It only seems to happen on Excel for Mac 2016 and 2019. I know that starting with Excel for Mac 2016, Excel is “sandboxed”, meaning you cannot save files wherever you want via VBA code. But my code is written to save the file in a particular folder that should always be accessible by Excel, regardless of the sandbox limitation:


/Users/[UserName]/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/


(My code creates a new folder inside the Data folder, and then saves an Excel file into that new folder.)


On all the Mac’s I have tested my workbook on, it works fine. Also, many other people are using the workbook with no problems. But a few people are reporting the error, and I don’t understand what might be causing it. Would anyone here happen to have any ideas? I thought about it being a permissions issue with writing to the above folder, but I had one of the affected people check the permissions of it, and they said it is set to ‘Read & Write’ -- so that doesn’t appear to be culprit.


One of the affected people is running Catalina (10.15.3) and Excel for Mac 2019 (v16.35 - the latest update as of today’s date).


I’m not a Mac expert, so I don’t know what else might be causing the problem. I appreciate any help anyone can offer!

Replies

Apple Developer Forums is a community for discussing developer-level issues with Apple’s SDKs and tools. It is not an official Apple support channel, even for developer issues, and it’s definitely not the right place to feedback/get answers about user-level issues.


User-centric queries/comments such as this are perhaps best put to AppleCare's public community support forums, Apple's twitter support account and/or Apple’s YouTube Support Channel vs. risking off-topic here in DevForums, thanks and good luck.

https://support.apple.com/

I had the same problem. Ron de Bruin addresses these issues here: rondebruin.nl/mac/mac005.htm
Hi, how did you address the issue? Currently experiencing the same problem.