Glitches with Excel in Leopard

Bob Cartwright wrote:
> Excel in Leopard quits unexpectedly, screen goes blue and all data is lost. Have tried to have fixed my Mac Experts but nothing works. HELP !!!. No one seems to know what to do. :angry:

Hi Bob,

When does this happen? Is it when you are trying to open a specific
file? Is it every time you try to open Excel? Are you using Excel v.x,
2004, or 2008? Have you updated office?

Please respond with more information.

Thanks.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are independent experts who are not affiliated with Microsoft.
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

As I posted a while back, I had serious problems with keyboards and Excel 2004 and Leopard.

Thanks to the posters here, and my own digging, I was able to fix most of the problems by discarding the Excel preferences.

Still remaining were the keyboard entry freeze. After I enter a variable amount of cell input through the keyboard, the keyboard refuses to accept any more. However, when I mouse over to the menu & do a save-using the mouse-the keyboard frees up for a little while. Then I have to repeat the process. It's sort of been integrated into my work routine.

However, I think I've found a connection between the number of open toolbars and the length of time before freezes. Closing two toolbars means I can now enter a transaction or two without the keyboard freezing. And so far, the only freezes I've encountered lately have been on file commands.

The problem is almost as if the keyboard and the toolbars are sharing the same buffer, which is too small to begin with. But what do I know?
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

excel bogs down my system, crashes constantly, and no help is in sight.

Problem: using excel '04 on an osx tiger macbook, working with graphs will slow the system down terribly, and eventually will crash the program. When office '08 became available at my university I upgraded with the hope of fixing this problem. After upgrading to '08, excel was just as buggy, if not worse.

Help: So I call M$ customer support and spend 2.5 hours on the phone with an incredibly well intentioned, informative, and helpful technician. He worked with me, asked me to email him specific problem files, and attempted to recreate the problem. After all the work we did, he suspected I had faulty macbook, bad ram or something. He ran the a file that I could make crash instantly on 2 macs (leopard) he had access to, and a pc. The file was slow on all of the macs, but not the PC, but it never crashed. He also suggested that I upgrade to Leopard. The following day I upgraded to Leopard, and the problem persisted. At this point, I called Apple support, and after they stopped fumbling my call (I was on the phone for 45 min before someone attempted to help me), I dealt with some snooty know it all prick who belittled my use of open-source software on my mac (growl) and suggested that I reformat the HD and reinstall leopard. I relayed how annoyed I was that I had to do this with my mac, as this was the very reason I invested in a mac and not another PC laptop. After wiping my HD and reinstalling leopard, excel '08 had the same problems. So I had to drive 45 min to the apple store and drop off my macbook for hardware tests (very inconvenient for a grad student to be without their computer). 4 days later I get a call back from the mac 'genius' at the store and they find nothing wrong with my hardware. He says excel crashed on not only my macbook, but his floor computers he tested the file on.

Solution from apple: " wait for the update coming ~march 11". No explanation as to why both office '04 and '08 have the same problems. So I have a computer that isn't doing what I need it to do, and I'm going to have to resort to open office spreadsheets for my graphing needs.
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

I have just purchased a new MACbook Pro and 2008 student/teacher office pack...I do a lot of updating on a spreadsheet and one column which is designated for "text" is indicating "The value to be entered must be a date between 1/2/1994 and 1/1/2055. In addition text is not being reflected in the spreadsheet when noted as wrap unless I click on the cell. I don't own 2004 -if anyone has suggestions I would appreciate but also entering notes here for flag of MS staff monitoring - needless to say I am not happy. It has been a long time since I have worked on MAC - what other option do I have besides MS?
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

@ Fern Gale Estrow

openoffice dot org.

If you can stand a bit of a different interface, it is completely compatible with M$ products, however there are some formatting issues, but I have found that those are when opening a spreadsheet created in M$ excel.
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

We are looking into this problem, but unfortunately don't have any
resolution yet. Is there anything unique about your configuration when you
encounter this? Do you have other applications running, or just Excel?

Thanks,

Pat


On 13/03/2008 22:13, in article ee7fdb7.72.DeleteThis@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw, "Thomas
Correa" <tomblonde.DeleteThis@mac.com> wrote:

> I too have having an extremely annoying issue w/ Excel 2004 keyboard input
> occasionally, sometimes frequently freezing up when I try to type in a cell.
> It often happens after typing the first character in a cell successfully. I
> really haven't been able to find much regularity to it. The mouse continues to
> work fine. I can click around a bit and then the keyboard often continues to
> work again. I had the problem trying to open a password protected Excel file
> once, but after much clicking about I was able to get the password typed into
> the password box finally. I'll try the save button as suggested by others
> next. No problem w/ other applications. I'm on 10.5.2. Macbook Pro. 2GB RAM.
> My coworker has similar problem as well with Excel 2004 running on 10.5.2 but
> a newer Macbook Pro. I also skimmed Apple support and discussions. No solution
> there either, but I can see others with this issue there too. I can't upgrade
> to office 2008 since some of the spreadsheets I use require Macros. I hope
> Apple & Microsoft come up with a fix for this issue soon.

--
Pat McMillan
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corp.
This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

Derek wrote:
> @ Fern Gale Estrow
>
> openoffice dot org.
>
> If you can stand a bit of a different interface, it is completely compatible with M$ products, however there are some formatting issues, but I have found that those are when opening a spreadsheet created in M$ excel.

Hi,

I wish to challenge your assertion that OpenOffice is "completely
compatible with M$ products..." It's just not true. You won't make Mac
users happy by overselling open source products.

There's plenty to frustrate an advanced Excel user in OpenOffice, so
please stop exaggerating OO's capabilities.

Let's be honest and say that up to a point, OpenOffice and NeoOffice are
compatible with Microsoft products. OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are
different suites offering different components. The object models are
not identical, so right away there are incompatibilities.

Many of the differences are not trivial.

For example: VBA in OpenOffice 2.3.1 (the current shipping version) just
does not work at all in Leopard. You can point OO to the Java Runtime
Environment that ships with Leopard and it will refuse to recognize it.
So, like Office 2008, VBA is completely broken, MIA, non-functional.

VBA in OO applies only to Calc (the spreadsheet). There's no VBA at all
for word processing or presentations. If you thought Office 2004's VBA
editor was rudimentary, wait until you see the OO VBA editor. There's no
Object browser. You still need Microsoft Office 2004 to build your VBA
code and then try it out in OO. It will need a lot of tweaking.

VBA in NeoOffice 2.2.2, which is an earlier version of OpenOffice
recompiled in an Aqua interface, DOES support VBA on the Mac. (When I
refer to OO, I'm referring to both OpenOffice and NeoOffice and use the
terms interchangeably). NeoOffice DOES recognize the JRE. There's a huge
BUT, however. VBA in all of OpenOffice is only partially implemented. No
UserForms. Many commands do not work. It will be years before VBA in OO
is robust, and because of object model differences some VBA commands
will never work in OO.

Using SQL in Excel vs Calc (the OpenOffice spreadsheet program) is quite
different. Excel has a true SQL GUI. OO does not (if it does, I haven't
found it yet). I was able to work my way through using ODBC and MS Query
in Microsoft Office. I'm no dummy but I still have not figured out the
OO way to do it.

I am not trying to trash OpenOffice here, just the notion that it is a
perfect substitute for Microsoft Office.

So if OO is not completely compatible with Microsoft Office, how
compatible is it?

My opinion is that it is "pretty good" overall. Focusing on Calc, almost
every Excel function is implemented. OO looks and acts like Excel much
of the time.

OpenOffice ODF (Open Document Format) is inefficient. Yesterday I zipped
a Microsoft Word document in .doc format and it was 14k. The same
document zipped in ODF was 148k - more than 10 times larger. The Open
Source crowd is still pushing for this file format. Yuk IMHO. But OO
does a very nice job of saving to .doc format, so I have no problem
ignoring ODF most of the time.

Until Office 2008 was released I could rely on Microsoft Office to
support VBA macros and add-ins. Now I can't. To me, the value of
NeoOffice is that it gives me an alternative way to create and
distribute cross-platform applications for Macs and Windows. But I don't
think OO is as good as Microsoft Office 2004.

For my money, Microsoft Office 2004 is what stays on my Mac. It's where
I "live" most of the time. I have NeoOffice so I can open the occasional
Office 2007/2008 documents that come my way, and so I can distribute
applications with VBA for both Macs and Windows.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are independent experts who are not affiliated with Microsoft.
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

> Bob Cartwright wrote:
> > Excel in Leopard quits unexpectedly, screen goes blue and all data is lost. Have tried to have fixed my Mac Experts but nothing works. HELP !!!. No one seems to know what to do. :angry:
>
> Hi Bob,
>
> When does this happen? Is it when you are trying to open a specific
> file? Is it every time you try to open Excel? Are you using Excel v.x,
> 2004, or 2008? Have you updated office?
>
> Please respond with more information.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Jim
>
> --
> Jim Gordon
> Mac MVP
>
> MVPs are independent experts who are not affiliated with Microsoft.
> <http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/>

There is no definite time that this happens. Totally random. It does not happen every time. Usually OK to open Excel, but once starting to work, happens most times. Using Excel 2004 and have updated office. Took into the "Genius" bar twice and they have done nothing to repair.

Thanks Bob
>
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

I had this same problem with Excel 2004 when using 10.5 on Intel
hardware, but only when using an external USB keyboard (not my MacBook
Pro's internal keyboard). Upgrading to Excel 2008 has completely cured
this.


On 2008-03-17 13:00:58 -0400, "Bob Cartwright" <bob RemoveThis @okprojects.com> said:

>> Bob Cartwright wrote:
>> > Excel in Leopard quits unexpectedly, screen goes blue and all data
>> is lost. Have tried to have fixed my Mac Experts but nothing works.
>> HELP !!!. No one seems to know what to do. :angry:
>>
>> Hi Bob,
>>
>> When does this happen? Is it when you are trying to open a specific
>> file? Is it every time you try to open Excel? Are you using Excel v.x,
>> 2004, or 2008? Have you updated office?
>>
>> Please respond with more information.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> -Jim
>>
>> --
>> Jim Gordon
>> Mac MVP
>>
>> MVPs are independent experts who are not affiliated with Microsoft.
>> <http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/>
>
> There is no definite time that this happens. Totally random. It does
> not happen every time. Usually OK to open Excel, but once starting to
> work, happens most times. Using Excel 2004 and have updated office.
> Took into the "Genius" bar twice and they have done nothing to repair.
>
> Thanks Bob
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

Bob Cartwright wrote:
>> Bob Cartwright wrote:
>> > Excel in Leopard quits unexpectedly, screen goes blue and all data is lost. Have tried to have fixed my Mac Experts but nothing works. HELP !!!. No one seems to know what to do. :angry:
>>
>> Hi Bob,
>>
>> When does this happen? Is it when you are trying to open a specific
>> file? Is it every time you try to open Excel? Are you using Excel v.x,
>> 2004, or 2008? Have you updated office?
>>
>> Please respond with more information.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> -Jim
>>
>> --
>> Jim Gordon
>> Mac MVP
>>
>> MVPs are independent experts who are not affiliated with Microsoft.
>> <http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/>
>
> There is no definite time that this happens. Totally random. It does not happen every time. Usually OK to open Excel, but once starting to work, happens most times. Using Excel 2004 and have updated office. Took into the "Genius" bar twice and they have done nothing to repair.
>
> Thanks Bob
Hi again,

OK - next step.

Do the things listed on this URL after running Alsoft DiskWarrior on
your computer:
http://www.mcgimpsey.com/macoffice/office/troubleshooting.html

I know it says for v.X but the same things apply to 2004.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are independent experts who are not affiliated with Microsoft.
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

I have found every time I try to maximize an Excel file originally created with Excel for Windows my entire Macbook Pro locks up. My system & software are only weeks old and I've downloaded/installed the latest Office 2008 upgrades which, I thought, was supposed to address the application's freezing.

My only solution thus far is to force my MBP to reboot by holding down the o/f button.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.
Greg
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

We are aware of this, and think it may be an Apple bug. Please see this
thread: http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Excel/822.

Thanks,

Pat


On 19/03/2008 06:05, in article ee7fdb7.78.TakeThisOut@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
"Greg_Thener@officeformac.com" <Greg_Thener.TakeThisOut@officeformac.com> wrote:

> I have found every time I try to maximize an Excel file originally created
> with Excel for Windows my entire Macbook Pro locks up. My system & software
> are only weeks old and I've downloaded/installed the latest Office 2008
> upgrades which, I thought, was supposed to address the application's freezing.
>
> My only solution thus far is to force my MBP to reboot by holding down the o/f
> button.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Greg

--
Pat McMillan
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corp.
This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard 

I find Excel in Leopard very unstable. This afternoon I have had two crashes. The first was when I was editing a formula to add the "$" signs so the cell references wouldn't change as I copied, and the second was as I was trying to do as "sumif" without using the "helpful" fill-in box on the right, just typing it in the (inconvenient to access) formula bar. I both cases Excel was trying to insert a "+" followed by a cell reference.

Does the new Excel work reliably with Leopard? This is only the beginning of the problems I have been having.

Ed
 >> Stay informed about: Glitches with Excel in Leopard