Use the Excel-File as file storage (possible?)

Hello everyone

I’m new in this forum and I have a “short” question. I’ve been searching for some time in the internet for a solution, but I haven’t found a good way to solve my problem yet. It may be, because I don’t really know the terms I should search with.

But, to my question:
Since version 2007, office saves files in a kind of zip-archive, which you can also extract by your own. If Excel opens a file, does the application extract this file to somewhere on the hard disk to use it (as long as the file is open in Excel) or does Excel it only load into the RAM?

The background to this question is, that if the structure in the zip-file is saved on the hard disk and Excel reads and writes its xml-files into this structure and when you save the workbook, this structure gets packed back into the xlsx-file, then you could add other files (like pdf’s or 3D-data, …) into this structure, which where embedded in the xlsx-file. In this case, I could access this files with Excel itself (access with VBA to the path).
The advantage of this idea would be, that you can “guarantee”, that the files you added are “always” with the xlsx file (because they are included) . If I want to share the Excel-file, I don’t have to copy the other files with the xlsx to share them (this is a disadvantage of a normal hyperlink ).

I hope that Excel works this way, and of course that someone would know something about that to help me

I really appreciate any help you can provide.

With kind regards, Ramon

PS: If you find any spelling mistakes or other grammar mistakes, which belong to my English skills, you can keep them

Originally Posted by FDibbins

Hi, welcome to the forum

firstly, your english is excellant (and everyone makes spelling mistacks lol)

Short answer, the only thing that gets saved, when you save a excel file (.xls/xlsx etc), is that file, along with any data, formulas, links

Hi, FDibbins

Thank you for your reply

That means, my idea doesn't work this way...?
Do you have another idea/possibility to embed various files in Excel, which I could read (open, extraxt) and write (import) dynamicly by using VBA?

This is actually quite an interesting idea and I can see the appeal of it. Have you tried doing it manually? The thing I'd be cautious of is whether excel rebuilds the full folder structure or not and in doing so removes any comtained files.

Hello together

Thank you for your replies. Today, I tested to add a file manually to the xlsx-file and it seems, that Excel doesn’t accept other files or even other folders in its structure.

So, I think, this won’t work in that way…

But does someone have another idea to add files to an Excel-file? I already had a look at alternate-data-stream, but I think that’s not that what I want. As I understood, this works only on ntfs-formatet systems and not over (for example) e-mails.

Thank you for any help or ideas

Hey there again

I found a way (which isn’t very elegant, but works in a way) to add a file to the xlsx-file. The problem is now, that the xlsx-file is locked, because it’s loaded in Excel (of course). If I could access from the same xlsx-file, in which I want to add a file to, then I could add another file to the archive without error message when I load the file.

The way I found is, that I insert an object in Excel to the xlsx-file (Insert-Object-From File). This creates an additional structure in the xlsx-archive, which includes the folder “\xl\embeddings”. In that folder, I can add any file, which is a .bin file (this new file is accepted from Excel). When I want to export this embedded files, I only have to change the extension to the one of the file.

The only problem now is, that I can only read this files, while the xlsx-file is open in Excel, but I can’t write new files into the xlsx-file from the file itself.

If I could solve this problem, I could implement my idea… :D