Excel 2004 experiencing repeated frequent crashes

[ShaneDevenshire]

Hi Folks,

I have a friend who sent me the following problem, any suggestions?

"I am running Excel® 11.3.5 (2004 for Mac) on a MacBook Pro w/OS X 10.4.10
with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo with 1GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM and am experiencing
severe instability issues.

When working with a set of 3 workbooks that are large and heavily linked (to
each other), Excel randomly quits about every 3 minutes."

TIA,
Shane Devenshire

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Hi Folks,

I have a friend who sent me the following problem, any suggestions?

"I am running Excel® 11.3.5 (2004 for Mac) on a MacBook Pro w/OS X 10.4.10
with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo with 1GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM and am experiencing
severe instability issues.

When working with a set of 3 workbooks that are large and heavily linked (to
each other), Excel randomly quits about every 3 minutes."

First, he should update to 11.3.7, but that's almost certainly not his
problem. Nor is it likely anything on the Mac side, especially if the
crashes only happen with those workbooks.

Second, how large is "large", and how heavy is "heavily linked"?

It sounds more like his workbook(s) have become corrupted.
Unfortunately, MacXL's ability to handle corrupt files is less well
developed than with WinXL.

The best way to approach it, IMO, would be to copy the workbooks to
fresh files (using Copy/Paste rather than Edit/Move or Copy Sheet.
Unfortunately, this may tend to be difficult with a lot of links.

Alternatively, it might be possible to fix *some* instability (but not
all, in my experience) by round-tripping the files through WinXL03 -
performing a Save As rather than just a Save.

It *could* be even better to round-trip it twice through XL07 - once
creating a .xlsx file (which, almost by the definition of SGML won't
have any corruption), then reopening and saving as a .xls file.