Steven Day said:
Am running 10.4.8 and all the latest Office updates. I'm tired of Excel
either crashing or refusing to save data that has been entered. This has
happened several times lately. At least the last time I could take a screen
shot to re-enter the data manually later.
This program is mature enough that I don't expect these types of issues. I
hope iWork gets its spread sheet application out soon so I can dump this
piece of garbage.
What version of XL (e.g., v.X? 2004?)
Have you repaired disk permissions?
Are you running any macros or add-ins? While I can fairly reliably crash
any version of Mac XL when I'm developing in VBA, I find I can't break
it when run in a factory default configuration.
Any commonality in what you were doing among the "several times" XL's
crashed? Was the refusal to save on a local drive/account?
Have the crashes occurred when working with the same (or close copies of
the same) workbook? Are the workbooks ones you've generated or have they
come from elsewhere?
Have you tried trashing the XL and Office preferences?
There are many alternatives to XL, so if you don't need absolute
compatibility, there's no need to wait for a version 1 of an iWork
application (which, if it had no bugs, would be the first non-trivial
application in modern memory to do so). I find gnumeric to work well,
though it requires the X10 environment to run. NeoOffice and other
OpenOffice derivatives have been fairly stable (though I can't
personally vouch for their macro/scripting stability - I don't have any
clients that script with anything other than XL).
As a stopgap, make sure when you save your workbooks that you set the
Always make backup option (SaveAs/Options...). If you save your default
workbook template with that option, every workbook you generate will
include it as well. Then you won't lose too much data (and I've found it
uncanny how rarely I get a crash when my data is backed up - I'm not
superstitious, but it's remarkable nonetheless).
