Excel asking to grant access on Mac

Copper Contributor

Many Mac computers in my company suddenly started to experience intermittent "Grant Access" dialogs upon saving Excel files on desktop. The timing for all of these computers seems more than a coincidence. In conjunction with this timing, some users have various problems saving (causing Excel to freeze and must be force-quit) or re-opening files (Excel file can not be read and opened, and I had to load the files in Google Sheets to retrieve the data, which appeared perfectly intact). If a file is passed to another computer, it opens fine, so it's not a file issue - it's a software issue. All software is updated, and these are locally stored files - they are not on OneDrive, nor are they shared.

 

We have reset permissions on the Mac per Microsoft's guidance, but that didn't resolve the issue. Our only work-around is uninstalling Excel version 16, and reverting back to Excel version 15, but that is not a long term solution because it means we can't perform software updates.

 

This has been plaguing us since version 16 was introduced. Some computers encounter it more than others, and if a computer doesn't experience this often, I didn't revert that one back to version 15. However, for the remaining computers who are stuck in version 15, I need to eventually let them start updating again, although the users of those computers won't let me upgrade them until I am 100% confident in the solution. They don't want to be guinea pigs for testing solutions.

 

Does anyone know how to resolve this issue?

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