In the last few days, we have started to see a rash of issues with Excel files that have been downloaded from NetSuite causing issues when opened in Excel. The biggest issue is that they open up in Protected Mode, which is good considering the files are coming from the Internet, but because they are opening up in Protected Mode, excel is freezing up, and the only solution we have found to get around that is to turn Protected Mode off in Excel, which is a bad practice in this day and age. Is anyone else seeing the issue, and if so, have you figured out a work around. It is amazing that NetSuite is able to incorporate AI into their system, but can not update the version of Excel a file gets exported in.

I have downloaded Excel files from NetSuite daily and it's always opened up initially in this protected view. Maybe the problem is with Excel itself, as it is freezing up? Is this happening to multiple users?

Yes, today we had 2 users with this issue, yesterday we had 3 and Tuesday we had 2. We did notice with todays users, their Office version was updated, we are looking back at the other users to see if that is the case. The weird thing is, if we download an Excel file from another website, it opens fine in protected mode, it seems to only occur when we open files from NetSuite as they are in .xls version, where the other files all seem to be in .xlsx version.

Yah maybe the updated Excel has issue with .xls Could you import from netsuite with CSV and open in Excel?

But the main issue is, we have to turn off Protected mode in Excel for anyone that downloads Excel files from NetSuite, this is a huge security risk.

Download and change file type to .xlsx?

Our Network guy is working on a script that will run on our users computers when they attempt to open a .xls file, and covert it to .xlsx right away.

I need a network guy.

Sorry, you can not have mine, he is a wiz with powershell scripts!

Knocked this up a couple of years ago as a workaround mainly for NS, I did create a v1.1 but never got around to releasing it as stacked with project work. It's fully open source so use it how you like ... https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/auto-convert-csv-to-xlsx/bpcbpnlhalnkaheioffegmhhdlmooieg?pli=1

So we have done some more digging and even after converting the .xls to .xlsx, the same users are having the issue. After more digging, we have discovered that the issue is the Intel Graphics card driver for these laptops, as each user has the same laptop model and graphics card, we take the exact same file to a different model of laptop, and no issues. Interesting that a graphics card would cause this issue.