Why is MS Excel renaming worksheets (truncating names)? Is there a fix for this?

[Charles F. Radley]

Why is MS Excel renaming worksheets (truncating names)? Is there a fix for
this?
Why is Excel renaming worksheets? Is there a fix for this?
I am seeing something very strange with some Office-2003 Excel spreadsheets
I am trying to manipulate.
My spreadsheets contain many sheets (tabs), many with long names (e.g. 44
characters).
When I make copies of these spreadsheets the names of some of the sheets get
changed, i.e. truncated (e.g. down to 31 characters).
This is a problem for me because QTP is using the names of the sheets to
parse data.
Are you aware of any issues in Excel which might cause something like this?
The issue has only become apparent recently, spreadsheets created last year
did not suffer from this problem. Maybe it was introduced by a recent
service pack to Office-2003?
Exploration:
I installed OPENOFFICE 2.2 on my machine.
This a free counterpart of Microsoft office, available from
http://www.openoffice.org
When I manipulate spreadsheets in OpenOffice, the sheet name is preserved.
When I exit Excel after opening a spreadsheet saved in OpenOffice, Excel
asks me if I want to save it in the "new" Excel format .. Of course the
correct answer is "no".
However When I launch QTP using a spreadsheet saved in Openoffice, Excel
interrupts the QTP test and asks to resave the file in the new format. When
I click "no", the test then hangs. So I still do not have a solution to the
problem. Or does Microsoft have a fix for this?

 

[Dave Peterson]

There is a limit of 31 characters per sheet name in excel.

It's been that way for as long as I can remember (xl95 at least).

I don't use openoffice or Quatro Pro, but I don't understand how excel can
interrupt Quatro Pro after you've launched that program, then done file|open to
open your workbook.

 

[Charles F. Radley]

Greetings Dave,

Until recently we routinely used sheet names of up to 44 characters without
difficulty.

QTP = Quick Test Pro (from Mercury Interactive), is automated test harness.

Thanks,

Charles R.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Peterson" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.excel.setup
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 2:57 PM
Subject: Re: Why is MS Excel renaming worksheets (truncating names)? Is
there a fix for this?

 

[Roger Govier]

Hi Charles

Don't see how you achieved that.

this is a very long sheet name! is 31 characters and is the most I can
enter in any sheet in any version of Excel including XL2007

 

[Dave Peterson]

I guessed (incorrectly) at QTP.

You sure you used excel to create these workbooks with the worksheets with the
long names?

 

[Charles F. Radley]

These are Excel files.

The person who originally created them has left the company.

Until recently they were working fine.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I think you're miss-remembering the number of characters in the sheet name if
the files were created directly in excel.

But IIRC, there are other programs that can make .xls workbooks with invalid
sheet names.

I kind of remember seeing posts that complain about Crystal Reports (or some
other program???) doing this--and when the workbook was opened, the user was
told that the invalid sheet name was changed. (But I could be wrong about this
memory!)

 

[Charles F. Radley]

Hi Dave,

It is not a question of mis-remembering.

The worksheet is open in front of me right now, and there are tab names with
44 characters, 38 characters ,etc.

I am not hallucintating, this is real.

If the sheets were not created in Excel, can you offer ideas on how they
were created? I would gladly try a different tool.

I have tried Openoffice, but that does not solve the problem.

I do not believe we have Crystal reports here, but I can look into it if
you think that is a viable alternative.

Thanks.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Can you remove any proprietary information from that workbook, zip it and send
it to me.

I'd like to see it.

And I think that there are lots of programs that create native .xls files. I
don't have a list, but I know that Crystal Reports is one.

And I didn't mean to suggest that CR is an alternative to excel. I meant that
there are other programs that create those binary .xls files directly. Just so
that you can easily transfer data from the other source to excel using one of
these programs.

Hi Dave,

It is not a question of mis-remembering.

The worksheet is open in front of me right now, and there are tab names with
44 characters, 38 characters ,etc.

I am not hallucintating, this is real.

If the sheets were not created in Excel, can you offer ideas on how they
were created? I would gladly try a different tool.

I have tried Openoffice, but that does not solve the problem.

I do not believe we have Crystal reports here, but I can look into it if
you think that is a viable alternative.

Thanks.