Undo, redo buttons always grayed out

[Karl]

PRODUCT
Office 2000 Small Business Edition
O/S: Xp Home Edition, v. 5.1, serv. pack 2
Br: Inernet Explorer 7

The undo/redo buttons are grayed out in the toolbar and in the Edit menu
"can't undo" is grayed out. This started at some point in the past without my
noticing it or being aware of any particular action that I took that would
cause this. This is now the constant state of Excel when opening a new
spreadsheet or on any previously created spreadsheets. When copying such an
affected spreadsheet to a different computer Excel behaves normal with undo
available as usual. I have removed Office 2000 and reinstalled from CD and
same condition remains. I want to mention one other odd occurrence that
started at the same time in case there is a connection: the dialog boxes in
the drop down menus lost their gray background. The entry fields and buttons
are now displayed on an opaque white background.

Other conditions on my PC: I have a Visio button in the toolbar that I
thought may cause this condition and I removed Visio from my PC but button
remains after re-installing Office 2000 and I can't delete it. Also, I have
Visio button in Word and it doesn't interfere with Undo from Word Edit menu.
I wonder if there is a Registry entry that causes this?

Thank you for any help anyone can supply.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Undo and redo stacks are killed by lots of macros. Maybe the visio button is
doing something in the background that kills those options.

I'd start excel in safe mode to see if that corrects the problem:

close excel
windows start button|Run
type:
excel /safe
and hit enter

Test it out.

If the problem is fixed, then it's time to make a decision about that button.

Chip Pearson has some notes on how to diagnose startup errors:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm

And Jan Karel Pieterse has more notes:
http://www.jkp-ads.com/Articles/StartupProblems.asp

=====
And if the safe mode doesn't fix the problem, then maybe the number of
undo/redos was changed to 0.

xl2k and above
XL: How to Modify the Number of Undo Levels
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=211922

xl97
XL97: How to Modify the Number of Undo Levels
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=162944

 

[Karl]

Thank you very much for your time and helpful info.

I solved the problem by working thru all the steps that you recommended. In
the end it was the redo stacks set to 0 in the registry. Strangely enough the
registry entry had been modified. It had to be caused by some interference
from another program or process. Possibly Visio or Text Bridge. Now that I
know how to check it out I think I will reload these programs again.

The background is still missing from the dialog boxes but I can live without
that. Unless someone has a pointer for this issue I won't be bothering
anymore.

Thanks again.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I don't have a guess about the background color.

You may want to go through the same startup error instructions again and see if
there's something causing the trouble.