I'm trying to determine if the file or program is corrupt. Or if it is
operator error. We are changing to a new computer and installing the
program fresh. We don't want to ruin the new setup by loading in a
corrupt file.

My mom volunteers at a charity, and they use excel to keep track of
statistics that they need for grant money. Over the past year, the
program keeps making changes, and my mom has to keep correcting the
file.

Basically, she has a list of clients with name, client #, city, and a
few other details.

When she closes the file, everything looks great. When she comes back
the next week, the columns are misaligned. It's different every time.
Sometimes, only one column like first name is out of alignment with the
rest. Maybe moved up a few lines. Sometimes, several columns are out of
alignment, so you get something like this:

firstname2 lastname1 client#1 city5
firstname3 lastname2 client#2 city6
firstname4 lastname3 client#3 city7
firstname5 lastname4 client#4 city8
firstname6 lastname5 client#5 city9

It seems like it moves up and either fills in gaps, but we aren't sure.
She doesn't think that it actually covers up information that is
already there, but she isn't sure. I have never seen a before and
after. She just shows me the file when it is all wrong, and I don't see
what it was like before or what might have happened. And I am not very
familiar with Excel. It didn't come on my desktop, so I only used it a
little bit when I was in college and had to use it there.

When it first starting happening, we thought it was because the files
was so huge. She was creating new worksheets for each quarter instead
of new files. So, she deleted all the old quarters and renamed it as a
new file, much smaller.

We thought it was maybe the old computer having probelms, so we tried
working on the file at home, and it does it there too.

We have gotten a new computer to use at the office. It is an older
computer, windows 98. 18 GB hard drive, 512MB ram. Should be a decent
computer. All it needs to do is run excel and keep track of this file.

I have installed Excel on the computer, and now we need to decide
whether to manually type in the 1800 clients or load in the old file.

Any ideas on what causes this problem? Does it sound like a corrupt
file, and we should just type it all in fresh? Or does it sound like
something that is being caused over and over again? Perhaps closing the
file wrong or hitting some command that shouldn't be touched?

My mom is not computer savy. And there are a couple other people at the
charity who also enter information, and they aren't good with computers
either. Every week, my mom spends hours fixing the problems and
entering in new information.

I welcome any suggestions. At this point, she is going to enter all the
new clients, and then start manually entering all the old clients
(about 1800). But that will be a total waste of time if the problem is
an operator error and not a corrupt file.

Thank you very much.