Office 2008 SP1

[Niko]

Man, do I wish I'd ignored this advice. After applying the update, my

primary spreadsheet crashes Excel. Every. Damn. Time. I update one
field, and notice that nothing else is updating. If I change anything
else, crash! Excel has gone from annoying (a series of inaccurate
"out of memory" and "too many font" popups) to completely useless.
Wish I'd never upgraded from the pre-Intel version.

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem since I upgraded my Office 2008 with Service Pack 1: If I open our company main budgeting/planning Excel and change a percentage field that affects some other figures, after hitting enter Excel 2008 freezes and uses 100% of the CPU time until it is Force quit. It says "Calculating Cells: 0%" and freezes. I have waited ten minutes and then force quit it.

I can reproduce this every time. And, before applying SP1 I never had a problem. Also, if I open the file with Office 2007 it works like a charm.

I have a MacBook Pro Core Duo and I have tested this with OS X 10.5.2 and 10.5.3.

Unfortunately I cannot submit the sheet. I have submitted the Apple Problem Report. If you tell me where to send that debug information after force quitting Excel, I can do that. Or if there is a way to run Excel in a debug mode I can reproduce this and send the information.

At this time Excel 2008 is useless to our company but luckily this affects to only one upgraded workstation.

Kind Regards,
Niko

 

[Pat McMillan]

Hi Niko,

I'm sorry you're experiencing this problem. It sounds serious. However, I
don't think this is the same problem as others have reported in this thread.
Although I understand that you can't share the affected workbook as it is, I
wonder if you might be able to strip out any confidential information (by
changing numbers or text), then save it out with a new name and send it to
me ([email protected]). If it's a big workbook (say with lots of sheets
or data in lots of cells), you might try deleting one sheet at a time, then
saving, and seeing if the problem still occurs. The smallest file that we
can get from you that still causes the problem, the better.

Please let me know if you would be able to do that. I'd love to get to the
bottom of this.

Pat

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Niko -

Pat's the boss on this issue, but there were a couple of things which
weren't crystal to me and clarification may be useful to him:

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem since I upgraded my Office 2008 with Service
Pack 1: If I open our company main budgeting/planning Excel and change a
percentage field that affects some other figures, after hitting enter Excel
2008 freezes and uses 100% of the CPU time until it is Force quit. It says
"Calculating Cells: 0%" and freezes. I have waited ten minutes and then force
quit it.

I can reproduce this every time. And, before applying SP1 I never had a
problem. Also, if I open the file with Office 2007 it works like a charm.

Did the same file work correctly in *2008* before SP1? Or was it with 2004
that there was no problem?

I have a MacBook Pro Core Duo and I have tested this with OS X 10.5.2 and
10.5.3.

Unfortunately I cannot submit the sheet. I have submitted the Apple Problem
Report. If you tell me where to send that debug information after force
quitting Excel, I can do that. Or if there is a way to run Excel in a debug
mode I can reproduce this and send the information.

At this time Excel 2008 is useless to our company but luckily this affects to
only one upgraded workstation.

Is it just the one workstation which has been updated to 12.1.0, or have the
others been updated but are not exhibiting the same problem? If not updated,
are those at 12.0.0, 12.0.1, or some other version of Office?

Kind Regards,
Niko

One other question: Has the problem workstation had permissions repaired
since it was updated with SP1? If not you might try doing so & see if it
makes a difference.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Niko]

Hi Bob and Pat,

Thanks for your reply. Here is the extra information you asked.

I have extracted a small piece of the sheet and it crashes Excel every time you edit a certain cell. I have sent the file to Pat with instructions on how to reproduce the problem and with the information that is shown to the user after force quitting the frozen excel.

Pat's the boss on this issue, but there were a couple of things which
weren't crystal to me and clarification may be useful to him:

Did the same file work correctly in *2008* before SP1? Or was it with 2004
that there was no problem?

The file had no problems with 2004, 2007, or 2008 without SP1. After installing Office 2008 SP1 the problems began.

Is it just the one workstation which has been updated to 12.1.0, or have the
others been updated but are not exhibiting the same problem? If not updated,
are those at 12.0.0, 12.0.1, or some other version of Office?

Others are still 2004 and there is one 2007 on Vista that work ok with this file.

One other question: Has the problem workstation had permissions repaired
since it was updated with SP1? If not you might try doing so & see if it
makes a difference.

I just repaired the permissions (there was only one error (private/etc/cups) and show details was checked in disk utility) and tested again: it still crashed.

Regards,
Niko

 

[Pat McMillan]

Thanks Niko. As I mentioned in our discussion offline, we have a fix for
this problem that's ready to release in our next update. We hope to get that
out soon.

Thanks,

Pat

 

[c.r]

too can't get my preferences to come up by using the apple comma key or going to the pull down menus ever since the upgrade

any solutions yet??

 

[Pat McMillan]

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to reproduce this yet. Would you be able
to help? If you could take a system profile and send that to me, and also
send me the file com.microsoft.Excel.plist in your user/Library/Preferences
folder it would help me investigate. If you can do so, please send directly
to me at (e-mail address removed).

Thanks,

Pat