"Cliff Myers" wrote in
:

I do it all the time as well. What is happening is you have excel
open already and your personal.xls is already loaded. Personal.xls is
loaded automatically when excel loads. It is not pointing to another
personal.xls it is just trying to load something that is already
loaded. You will either need to close excel before running this
application or have the application check to see if excel is already
open before it opens it again.
HTH

Thanks

I don't think this is what is happening (although may be) as there are
definitely no other Excel's open - and there is no warning message on
opening Excel - only when I try and run the macro button from within an
instance of Excel openend by this other application.

But this does suggest that maybe the application is opening a background
Excel and suppressing warning messages. I'll have a look at the
processes running to see if multiple instances of Excel is a possible
contributory factor.

The application probably contains some very old Code (from 10 years ago)
so my just be using outdated VB / Excel proctices for handling files /
menus etc.