I have a spreadsheet that won't open, it doesn't time-out or cause an error.
It just sits there indefinetly. The size of the worksheet is 3MB, but I have
others that size. Are there any tools to troubleshoot if the file is corrupt?

There's a standard Office trick: hold down the Shift key as you're opening
any Office file, and no auto-execute macros (AutoNew, AutoOpen, AutoExec,
Workbook_Open, Document_Open, etc.) will run. This even applies in Windows:
at logon (scripts won't run) and when inserting a CD (autorun won't run).

With Excel this is iffy at best -- double-clicking an XLS file in Explorer
with Shift down doesn't work (i.e., auto-macros still run), nor does dragging
an XLS file from Explorer to Excel's title bar. But if you open just Excel,
close the empty workbook, use the File/Open command to navigate to the file,
hold down Shift as you click the Open button, and keep holding it down until
the file is open, that will work.

So, just open an empty Excel, use File/Open to point to your file, hold down
Shift as you click Open, and keep holding it down for a minute or so. If
it's still hanging, it's probably corrupt, but you can try using Access, OLE,
ODBC or MS Query to try to link to it. If not, hit Alt-F11 to get to the VBA
editor, hit Ctrl-R to open the Project Explorer, click your workbook's entry
there, hit the * (asterisk) on the numeric keypad to expand everything. Then
double-click ThisWorkbook to see if there's any Workbook_Open routine,
double-click every sheet to check for Worksheet_Activate, and finally use
Edit/Find to seach the whole project for any of the auto-execute macros I
mentioned above.

You might also check any add-ins (Tools/Add-ins) or files in the alternate
startup location (Tools/Options/General).

--

--Andy Smith



"Scott" wrote:

I have a spreadsheet that won't open, it doesn't time-out or cause an error.
It just sits there indefinetly. The size of the worksheet is 3MB, but I have
others that size. Are there any tools to troubleshoot if the file is corrupt?