Formula Bar Access

[Thweed]

Unable to view Formula Bar (View Formula Bar is ticked).
Formula Bar (cell contents window) is tucked under the Command Line
(Excel - File - Edit - View, etc.)
It begins to appear after I have input about 25 characters into the
cell.
I have tried the Visual Basic reset of Top 100 and Left 100. This has
only repositioned the Formula Bar in the background behind Format -
Tools - Data on the command line.
Problem showed up yesterday (I was doing a lot of drawing in Excel).
Using this version of Excel for about 2 years now with no problem.
This is Version 11.3 (060914) Student version of MS Office, running on
a 2 Ghz Intel Core Duo version 10.4.8

Can you help?

 

[Stephen Adams]

Unable to view Formula Bar (View Formula Bar is ticked).
Formula Bar (cell contents window) is tucked under the Command Line
(Excel - File - Edit - View, etc.)
...
Can you help?

You might be able to fix your problem by judiciously trashing any or all
Microsoft Office cache files or preference files.

The cache files are located in your ~/Library/Caches folder.

The preferences are located in your ~/Library/Preferences folder.

Deleting the caches won't cause any problems, but your initial use may
be slowed up a bit while the application works to rebuild them. As for
the preferences, they're generally safe to delete as well, but you will
have to reset your preferences from your memory or notes. Both types of
files can, and do often, get corrupted, causing all sorts of odd behavior.

Good luck.

Steve A

 

[Geoff Lilley]

Agree with Steve. I've had a student who had the same problem;
trashing the preference file took care of the problem.

Cheers,
Geoff Lilley
Microsoft Office Master Instructor (2000/XP)
Apple Certified HelpDesk Specialist (OS X 10.4)

 

[Thweed]

Thanks, Steve and Geof.
I could not find any reference to Office or Excel in either the Cache
or Preference folders.
I had tried to re-install Office . . . but the problem remained.
Last resort was to UNINSTALL!! Could not believe it, but the problem is
gone, when I did the install AFTER uninstall.
I just hate it when "back to basics" sometimes works!!

 

[CyberTaz]

And sometimes just tweeking the position of the bars can do it. Drag 'em
away then drag 'em back making sure that the 1st 'snaps' to the menu bar &
that each one 'snaps' to the bottom edge of the one above.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I had tried to re-install Office . . . but the problem remained.

Reinstalling almost never works for Macs. It's a no-brainer staple in
the Windows world - I suspect, at least partly, because many installers
change the registry - and reinstalling sometimes overwrites corrupt
registry entries.

With Mac Office, the equivalent settings are in the

~:Libraryreferences:Microsoft

folder (where ~ is your home directory). You should certainly have seen
Office and Excel preference (.plist) files in that directory. But simply
reinstalling Office, as with other Mac applications, doesn't change the
Preferences folder, so you get the same bad behavior.

Uninstalling, by running the Remove Office application, DOES remove the
preferences, so when you reinstall Office it starts up with a fresh set
of prefs.