Excel 97 crashes with Windows 2000

[Arnie]

After importing data from a mainframe application into Excel 97 a
particular
column contains time/date information. If more than one cell in the
column is selected, Excel immediately ends. If I select the entire
column using the column header and format the data I do not get the
problem.

My issue is if I run the same data on a Win NT machine I do not get
the failure and do not have to format the data.

Has anyone else experienced such problems and have you perhaps found a
solution?

Arnie

 

[Dave Peterson]

It might be a coincidence.

I'm guessing you transferred your mainframe data to a text file, then did a
file|open and parsed the records the way you wanted.

Could you try it again with a fresh new workbook?

I'm guessing that either the workbook is corrupted or excel is broken. But if
it only happens in that one workbook, then it doesn't sound like excel itself.

If it's still broken when you retry, there are some things that may help.

1. Close excel and clean up your windows temp folder
windows start button|run|%temp%
is a quick way to get to that folder.

Back to excel to test it.

If it's still broken.

2. Start Excel in safe mode (to avoid loading anything that could cause
problems (toolbars/addins/macros)

With excel closed
windows start button|run
excel /safe

Back to excel to test it.

If that worked, maybe it was a toolbar that went bad.

3. close excel
Windows|start button|find/search)
look for *.xlb
Rename them all to *.xlbOLD

Back to excel to test.

If it worked, just delete those *.xlbold files and rebuild any toolbars
at your leisure.

If it didn't work, maybe it's time to reinstall xl97. (newer versions have a
Detect and repair option under Help. (xl97 doesn't.)

Depending on your version of windows (not version of excel), this might help:
OFF97: How to Completely Remove Microsoft Office 97
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;158658

And if all this fails, Chip Pearson has a bunch of suggestions to help diagnose
problems that occur when excel starts up.

Maybe they can help you diagnose your problem.

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/StartupErrors.htm