Saving a spread sheet

[James]

I have a user who has a excel spreadsheet 0.5Mb. What they are trying to do
is copy & paste cells columns A to F (rows 1 to 1300) to G to L (rows 1 to
1300) . This copies fine, there are no filters, however there is a bit of
formula but noting unusually out of the ordinary. So once the data has
copied over they select save and get the following error message;
"Excel.exe has generated errors and will be closed by windows. You will
need to restart the program. An error log is being generated."

Columns are from A to AO
Rows from 1 to 1300

I have tried on another several other machines but the same error occurs. I
suspect that this is a corrupt spreadsheet as others are ok. If this is a
corrupt excel spreadsheet why do you think this may have happened and how to
prevent it from happening again (also could not find anything on Technet on
this - are there any articles)? If however it can be fixed please please let
me know.

Thanks in advance for you help \ suggestions

James

 

[Ronald R. Dodge, Jr.]

I have in the past ran into this same type of error within my set of macro
codes dealing with production reports. The issue you are probably running
into, which is the very same issue I ran into as I was running my reports,
Excel by default has 16 undo levels. However, for those undo levels to take
place, there has to be sufficient memory to be able to handle this. There's
one other glitch of Excel with regards to the RAM usage. Excel 97/2000 will
typically crash once it exceeds about 80MBs of RAM usage, just as Excel
2002/2003 will crash if it exceeds 160MBs of RAM, regardless how much RAM
you have on your system.

I had to go into the registry file and add in a new key, just as KB211922
indicates, and I set the undo level to 4. That was due to the fact that I
had the code setup to copying a rather large amount of data, and then
converted that range from formulaes to values, which after doing this to
something like 15 different machine center workbooks via code, Excel had
crashed on me after only doing 2 of them. However, once I added in this
registry key to the system, Excel had quit crashing on me. Since that time,
my production reporting program has been revamped and is using less and less
in the way of formulaes as a lot of those formulaes has been converted to
functions and procedures within VBA.

Hope this is of help.

Ronald R. Dodge, Jr.
Master MOUS 2000

 

[Dave Peterson]

I'd do a little experiment.

Create a new workbook and copy over that data (essentially recreating the
workbook).

Then test it out there.

My bet is that your workbook (or worksheet) is corrupted. (You may be able to
just recreate that worksheet and save yourself some work.)

If you can find someone with a newer version of excel, you may want to try the
same thing in that version. Each version of excel seems to handle corruption
better (sometimes just differently, though).

In fact, opening the workbook in OpenOffice and saving (a copy??) there may be
able to help.

http://www.openoffice.org, a 60-65 meg download or a CD

 

[Ronald R. Dodge, Jr.]

Corruption could be the reason, but what had me think of the Undo levels is
cause of the large range of data that's being copied, and even at one point,
he states, Range A1:AO1300, though indirectly as it may be. Regardless if
it's being copied from or pasted to, with the default number of undo levels
within Excel being 16, that's a lot of cells to have to be stored into RAM
for a lot of steps.

One thing that was failed to be stated is which version of Excel is being
used. Excel 97, I would not even deal with it cause of how unstable that
version is. That version is so unstable, I would rather work with Lotus
123, v2.3 than to work with Excel 97. It's only Excel 2000 and beyond that
has been truly stablized.