hello everyone,
forgive me if this was answered in a previous post (i looked and
couldnt find it) i am having a problem with my workbook getting
corrupted and maybe someone here can hep with some idea as to WHY this
is happening.

I am using microsft excel 2003 sp 2

my workbooks typicaly have upwards of 35 worksheets and is quit large
(lots of data) and the problem (corruption) appears to be caused or
triggered while i am copying worksheets within a workbook. (this does
NOT ALWAYS cause corruption, as i do this a lot in building
workbooks.) ive narrowed it down to knowing that it HAS occured: when
i try and copy a worksheet into (within) the same workbook or to a new
workbook and i DO NOT get the new tab or workbook then i know it will
corrupt once i close out of the workbook. (but this doesnt help me
eliminate the problem or work around it since i have no idea when it
will all of a sudden no longer copy a tab until its to late.

before i close out there is absolutly no change in appearance or
ability except that copying a tab does not work. (corruption occures
whether i save the document or not) previously i have been able to
open the workbook back up but have lost all formatting and a few
formulas, and it is VERY time intensive to try and restore
everything.

in addition if you try and restore the formatting to the data within
the same workbook, it will work, however ultimatly it will corrupt
again so i have to copy all data to new tabs & new workbooks and
reformatt everything.

this time when it happened excel will not even open the file, when i
try to open it i get the message "unable to read file" so i have to
recreate a weeks worth of data from scratch!

any ideas on why this is happening? is it a virus that attacks excel
that our IT guys cant find? is it a quirk in excel due to size of the
file? number of worksheets?


some background,
this is what i do all day everyday (create excell spreadsheats at
work)
the IT department has checked my machine for viruses (found none) they
have said that if i am saving the file over the network that it could
be happening due to high traffic on the server (i started saving
localy until loading it to the server at the end of the day)problem
still occurs

it is sporadic and seems to be only when working with 1 very large
file once a month, (this is a newly created document from scratch, I
am not using any previously corrupted data or versions of the
worksheet)
and the data is run from our system database and exported to excel
just like all the workbooks i create on a daily basis so the source
data cannot be causing the corruption.

anyone have any ideas on WHY this is happening?
better yet, any idea on how to keep it from happening at all?
this is driving me nuts!

btw i cannot download any utilities to help "clean" the file, or
repair the file unless i get aproval from the IT group first and im
not sure how hard that is to do.

thanks for your help