Freaky Excel Problems

R

Ryan Holznagel

Can you help me with this puzzle and keep me from going crazy?

I have an ongoing problem with Excel in Office 2001 for Mac.  I've
been using it for two years now (on an iMac DVD).  It's just one big
document that keeps track of my website traffic and income.  The
document is now about 20 columns wide and 900 rows long.  It includes
several simple formulas: adding numbers for all 30 (or 31) days of the
month together, dividing the total for the daily average, etc.  Each
day I open the spreadsheet, add the day's numbers, and close it --
pretty simple stuff.

For about a year I've been battling a recurring glitch -- at first it
was rare, occurring maybe once every 30 days.  Now it is pretty much
every day, and the spreadsheet has become unusable. 

Here are the (multiple) symptoms, all of which occur upon opening the
saved document:

1)  Several of the columns are hidden.
2)  The dates in the date column are replaced with ######.
3)  New numbers, when entered, are changed to entirely different
numbers.  For instance, I type in 146,038 and when I hit return, the
cell the number changes to 15,239.  If I retype the correct number, it
changes right back to the bad number. 
4)  When this happens, the dependent numbers in the rest of the row
change from 0 to NUM!
5)  In money columns, old daily numbers all become "0."  However,
weirdly, the monthly totals (adding up the 30 individual dates, which
read "0") remain with the correct past totals.
6)  In money columns, new numbers entered are rounded to no decimals.
(I enter 29.36, and Excel instantly rounds it to 29.00) 

These are the main glitches.  Expanding column width does not get rid
of the "######." (Incidentally, if I resize any columns, save and
close, when I reopen the file the columns are all back to the default
size.)

Obviously, it's a huge problem.  Before I got around it by shutting
down the computer, restarting, and then hoping that the glitch would
be gone when I opened the document.  (Sometimes it was, sometimes it
wasn't.)  I recently re-installed Microsoft Office, hoping that would
fix the glitch. It hasn't.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Is there any solution?  Is it a
combination of problems, or one big foulup?

Thanks for any help you can offer!
 
J

J.E. McGimpsey

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Is there any solution?  Is it a
combination of problems, or one big foulup?

Sounds like it's a corrupt workbook. Select your used range, copy,
and paste to a new sheet (you may want to unhide any hidden columns
first).
 
S

Sj

I just wrote a new message (Subject: More weird behavior) about exactly the same problem that Ryan is describing. He has exactly described the problem I'm having (he did a much better, more complete job) except that mine has progressed to complete gray in 3 out of 4 workbooks. I've tried copying and pasting and it doesn't work. Since I had this problem in both 98 and 2001 it also isn't restricted to the version. I've also had the problem in OS 9.2.2 and 9. I upgraded from 9 to 9.1 to 9.2.2 from the Microsoft website. At some point before these problems started my machine became corrupted in some unknown way (I have kids and assume that they did something they shouldn't have). When I couldn't clean it up, I did a clean install from a CD and went back to OS 9 and haven't bothered to upgrade again. All my other programs are ok

How do we diagnose this? I am as desperate as Ryan is
Thanks
----- J.E. McGimpsey wrote: ----

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Is there any solution? Is it
combination of problems, or one big foulup

Sounds like it's a corrupt workbook. Select your used range, copy,
and paste to a new sheet (you may want to unhide any hidden columns
first).
 
J

J.E. McGimpsey

Sj said:
I just wrote a new message (Subject: More weird behavior) about exactly the
same problem that Ryan is describing. He has exactly described the problem
I'm having (he did a much better, more complete job) except that mine has
progressed to complete gray in 3 out of 4 workbooks. I've tried copying and
pasting and it doesn't work. Since I had this problem in both 98 and 2001 it
also isn't restricted to the version. I've also had the problem in OS 9.2.2
and 9. I upgraded from 9 to 9.1 to 9.2.2 from the Microsoft website. At some
point before these problems started my machine became corrupted in some
unknown way (I have kids and assume that they did something they shouldn't
have). When I couldn't clean it up, I did a clean install from a CD and went
back to OS 9 and haven't bothered to upgrade again. All my other programs are
ok.

See my response to your previous post for some suggestions.
 

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