Strange Happening with respect to Personal.XLS

[Jack Gillis]

Yesterday, Excel 2003 under Window XP Home stopped loading my
personal.xls. I'm sure it had a reason. I could open personal.xls by
clicking on it in the XLSTART folder and it would load fine which
surprised me for it always said 'Personal.XLS' was already running.

After trying several times, I did a system restore to a point earlier
in the day and after it finished rebooted, I got a notice that
instructed me to go to Help/About Microsoft Excel and look at the
disabled items. Sure enough, the Personal.xls addin was disabled. I
enabled it and things are fine.

Somewhere in the process I noticed something about Excel having been
started in the Safe Mode because 'A serious error' occurred. I've no
idea what the serious error was nor what caused it but wonder what the
Excel Safe Mode is and can it started manually?

No big deal, just curious.

Thank you.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Close excel
windows start button|Run
excel /safe

Is one way to start excel in Safe mode.

This ability to disable a workbook that excel thinks causes trouble was added in
xl2002. Everytime I've experienced this, excel has prompted me to find out if
it should disable the workbook.

Sometimes, there's nothing wrong with the workbook--but if there is some
corruption, you may want to (with excel closed) delete personal.xls and replace
it with one of your backup copies. If you don't have backups of your important
(all???) files, take some time and back them up now.

 

[Jack Gillis]

Interesting! Thank you.

As far a backing up files. I have two batch files. One backs up all of
my data files
and the other many 'system' files such as Office Templates, Excel11.xlb,
Personal.xls, Bookmarks for Firefox and so forth. Each uses xcopy to
copy files that have been modified or added since the last run to a
second physical HD. I run the first several times daily and the other
several times a week. As well, I Ghost my C: drive at least once a
week to the 2nd HD. And still, I have wished I had just one more backup
sometimes!

Anyway, thank you again.