Has this ever happened to you?

File is locked for editing by 'another user'. Yeah, but who is that other user?

At best an annoyance, this can be a real productivity killer as you hunt around to find the user that has the file locked. You could save a copy of the file and try to clean up or reconcile later, and while collaboration solutions like SharePoint limit these cases, most businesses still rely heavily on network storage that makes this impractical.

So, help make the word — or at least your office — a better place: click here and open this small vbscript file, which will set your Microsoft Office name to match your company’s network profile (Active Directory display name). Next time you have a file open, other users will know who you are.

Of course to be effective, everyone else will need to run this file as well. So send them this link so you’ll know who they are next time the leave a file open.

Shoutout to The Scripting Guys for this tip. I modified their code slightly to provide confirmation message, and you can learn more on their blog post.

Comments

No comments yet. Why don’t you start the discussion?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.