YAE7F: Yet Another Excel 2007 Flaw

[Mark Olbert]

I really, really like it when a company takes a stable, useful product and rewrites it so as to turn it into a flaky -- and
therefore less useful -- product. It gives meaning to my existence as a customer.

So here's the latest glitch/flaw in Excel 2007:

I have an xlsx spreadsheet. I don't recall doing anything special to it. Yet when I try to open it by double-clicking the file (this
is under Vista), Excel launches and displays... a blank screen. No spreadsheet.

Yet when I try to close Excel it comes back and asks me if I want to save the changes made to the file.

And I can't create another file of the same name as the "invisible" file.

So in some metaphyiscal sense the file is there. Only I can't see it, edit it, print it, or do anything with it.

This makes trying to update it kinda hard.

I would dearly love to get my file back. Anyone have any suggestions?

- Mark

p.s. One other odd behavior that I noticed before the file "disappeared": I'd close Excel, it would ask me if I wanted to save the
changes, the spreadsheet would disappear, but Excel would stay open. Since the "disappearing" file was the only one open at the
time, Excel should have shut down.

 

[Mark Olbert]

Sigh. Turns out there is a command to hide the entire file, which I never used but must have been activated somehow. So I have my
file back.

Is there some weird key chord that hides files? And can I suppress it?

- Mark

 

[Tyro]

That is not a glitch/flaw. Hiding workbooks in Excel has been around for
years. It is not new to Excel 2007. If you have a workbook open and go the
View tab on the ribbon and in the Window group select Hide or press Alt then
W then H, Excel hides the workbook. When you exit Excel, it will ask you if
you want to save the changes to the workbook. If you say "Yes", Excel will
save the workbook marked as hidden. When you next start Excel and open the
hidden workbook, it remains hidden. You can unhide the workbook by selecting
the View tab on the ribbon and then in the Window group select unhide or
press Alt, then W then U and Excel will show you a list of hidden workbooks.
Select your workbook. People who use the Personal.xlsx(m) workbook often
hide it in this manner. Don't blame Excel. You hid your own workbook. Excel
didn't. Blame yourself

Tyro

 

[Dave Peterson]

If you see this happen again, maybe it wasn't that you hid the workbook.

Lots of people have complained that when they doubleclick on a file in windows
explorer, that the workbook doesn't seem to show up in xl2007.

Jim Rech suggested this:

First, if you do something after Excel opens, like open the Options dialog and
close it, the workbook
appears (not much of a workaround, I know). Second, if I do not have my
Personal.xls or any other auto-opening workbook available, then the workbook
appears immediately.