Is Excel XP Buggier Than Previous Versions?

D

dkingfish

I was having a problem with Excel 2000. I could save my spreadsheets but
they wouldn't re-open. Our IT people have Office XP and had no trouble
opening them. My work was stored on a server instead of my hard drive.

To resolve the problem, they installed Office XP on my computer and
recommended saving my work on my hard drive and use the server storage for
backup, which I did. Now my workbooks open ok, but XP Excel will hang and
crash when doing simple tasks, such as formatting, (i.e. borders, background
fill, etc.), on some of the workbooks that wouldn't open with XL 2000 but
not all. Any idea of why this is and what I can do to prevent this? I do
have bloated VB, (not very good at writing code yet), and lots of formulas
in the workbooks. One good feature is the auto-recovery function. It's
saved me quite a bit, but it's still frustrating redoing the work after a
recovery.

And there's a new problem too. I also use Access, but don't know enough to
make it do some of the sorting and compile totals on reports using than one
table or query, so I export or copy information to XL. When I copy and
paste data from Access and also web pages, numbers are formatted as text.
The result, a page full of error checking flags. My questions about this
are; How do I copy and paste without changing number formatting? And, Is
there a way to correct all of the errors at once when I end up with a page
full of error flags? The cells with errors are intermixed with no error
cells, so the correction tab doesn't appear after I highlight rows or
columns the have error and non-error cells. Reformatting the columns
doesn't remove the error flags, only clicking the correction.
 
B

Bernard Liengme

No Excel 2002 is not buggy. Your IT people should be able to let you stored
files and access them on the server (we do it all the time). I think your PC
need a health check. Better yet ask IT for a replacement.
Bernard
 
D

Dave Peterson

One of the nicest features of xl2002 is the abililty to open files that earlier
version couldn't. But it can't save everything.

If your workbook is corrupt enough that xl2k couldn't open, but still not bad
enough to stop xl2002 from opening it, I'd take that as a warning to start
recreating that workbook. (In my opinion, you got lucky to be able to open it
xl2002. Don't wait for xl2002 to fail completely, too.)

(As an aside: OpenOffice also has a good reputation for opening those files,
too:
http://www.openoffice.org, a 60-65 meg download or a CD)

If you're faithful backing up your harddrive files to the network each night,
then it might even be easier for you. I gotta believe the time it takes to open
a file on the network is longer than the same file on your harddrive. (but do
back them up each night.)

David McRitchie has some notes at:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/backup.htm

Included in his notes are some old DOS Bat file code for making backups. Look
for "Backup, Backup, Backup always take Backups".

You could set up a shortcut on your desktop that copies your folders to the
network drives.

(I save almost everything to our network--I don't trust myself for making
backups.)

==========
I don't use Access, but I've seen a few posts that just say let Access store the
numbers as text and then convert them to numbers.

Select an empty cell, copy it.
select your range of text numbers.
Edit|Paste special|check add in the operation portion.
 
D

Dave Peterson

By "But it can't save everything", I didn't mean File|Save. I meant always fix
a corrupt workbook 100%.



Dave said:
One of the nicest features of xl2002 is the abililty to open files that earlier
version couldn't. But it can't save everything.
<<snipped>>
 

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