Disappearing personal.xls

[Ted Horsch]

I keep macros in a user's personal.xls worksheet and I
keep the worksheet in the user's XLStart folder. Problem
is that all of a sudden Excel isn't loading the
personal.xls file when it starts up. No idea what the
user did, but from one day to the next the personal.xls
file won't load.

I verified the personal.xls file's in the right place, and
I can open it manually and access all the macros that
way.

Any ideas as to why it would stop loading? Any ideas on
how I can get it to start loading again?

Thanks.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I've had my personal.xl* file not open, but I don't recall starting it manually.

But if you're using xl2002, this might be the problem/solution:

If you look under Help|About MS Excel, you'll see a button called: "Disabled
Items...".

Check under there to see if it's marked not to open. You can enable it there,
too. But if there is something wrong with it, you might end up copying your
backup into XLStart.

 

[Ted Horsch]

Dave, Many thanks for this help. The personal.xls was
the only item listed under disabled items. I enabled it
and I'm back in business. The interesting thing is that
even though I restored a good personal.xls file to my
XLStart folder Excel wouldn't recognize the file until I
enabled it to get it off the disabled list. Any idea how
items get placed on that list?

By the way, to start the personal.xls manually, all I did
was find the file and open it. I could hide it, save it,
change it, but it just wouldn't load on its own from
XLStart. Anyway, I'm good to go now. Thanks a million.

Ted

 

[Dave Peterson]

I don't know what xl looks at to determine that the workbook should be
disabled. If it has trouble opening something, it can get added there, though.

I've had my personal.xla file get quarantined a couple of times. One time, just
enabling it didn't help. The file was actually corrupted. I had to restore
from backup. The other time, just enabling it worked ok.

(So don't forget to backup your important files!)