personal.xls won't open when I start Excel

[Guest]

Recently, the personal.xls file won't open when I start Excel. The box for
"Open all files in " on the general tab under tools/options is blank. When
I've tried to change this to the Microsoft Excel startup directory
(C:\Documents and Settings\MyName\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART),
which does have the personal.xls fiel in it, it won't let me. As soon as I
click OK, it reverts back to a blank box. Any ideas? This is a recent
phenomena, as it worked fine for the past 9 months and don't really have any
idea as to what I might have changed (if anything). I have some very
valuable macros that I use often through buttons on a custom toolbar, so this
is really inconvenient.

Thanks,

John

 

[Guest]

Have you recently changed your Excel Security settings?

 

[Guest]

Not that I am aware of, unless one of the recent Microsoft security updates
did it automatically without my knowledge.

John

 

[Dave Peterson]

I have two guesses...

One your personal.xls is not in the correct location (difficult to think that
this could have changed, though).

I'd open excel
hit alt-f11 to get to the VBE
hit ctrl-g to see the immediate window
type this and hit enter:
?application.startuppath
For me (winXP and xl2003), I get:
C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART

Move your personal.xls to that folder.

My better guess...

Maybe personal.xls was disabled...

xl2002+ has the abililty to quarantine what it thinks are bad workbooks.

They can keep track of them so that it doesn't even try to open them.

If you look under Help|About MS Excel, you'll see a button called: "Disabled
Items...".

Check under there to see if it's marked not to open. You can enable it there,
too.

If the workbook is really bad, you may want to delete that copy and put a copy
of your backup version into your XLStart folder.

 

[Guest]

Thanks, Dave! The personal.xls was in the right place, but it was disabled.

John