"Too many diggerent formats"

[Gordana Godzo]

We have a big excel file of 17.5 MB with many different formats. Several
times we kept getting the warning: "Too many different formats". After
clicking "Ok", everything seemed to be ok.
However after trying to copy a sheet from another file into the big one, the
warning appeared again, and excel crashed. It was saved right before that,
so everything seemed to be ok, except that after that crash we are not able
to open the original file.
After attempting, it says: "Extracting data from ...[File name]" instead of
"Opening....[File name]" and opens a recovered version without formulas and
formats.

Do you think that the reason for the crash was the formatting and if we
manage to recover the file, what can we do in future not to get that
warning? Is there ant setup to fix, or what?

Thank you very much for your help

--
Gordana Godzo
Head of Controlling & Budgeting
TITAN Group - Cementarnica "USJE" AD Skopje
Prvomajska bb, 1000 Skopje
Republic of Macedonia
tel: +389 2 2786 138
fax: +389 2 2782 535
e-mail: (e-mail address removed)

 

[Tom Ogilvy]

I would suspect the problem is the result of pasting in the data and
exceeding the limits.

there are a limit of about 4000 different cell formats as I recall. While
this seems large, almost any difference in a formatting value will add a new
format to the count. So the solution would be to reduce the number of
formats - perhaps by using styles to make sure they are the same.