I don't think it's a corrupt workbook.

Corrupt workbooks usually mean that excel can't open them--not that the data is
mangled.

What it looks like to me is that the user (your mom or one of her co-workers)
has sorted the data. But instead of sorting all the data, they only sorted a
part (maybe a single column).

When I've seen this happen, it's usually because the user selected a column and
hit the A-Z or Z-A icon.

Excel guesses that since only one column was selected, that the user doesn't
want the adjacent columns included in the sort.

In fact, xl2002 (if I recall correctly) added a warning to the user when the
whole contiguous range wasn't selected first.

First, I'd make sure that the data is backed up regularly. (Habits can be
difficult to break.)

Secondl, tell your mom (and tell her to tell all the users) to never let excel
guess at the range that should be sorted/filtered/charted/anything.

Tell her to select the whole range (all the columns in that range), then use
data|sort.

========
An alternative, if you want to try to make her life a bit easier (and face
it--you owe it to her!!):

http://contextures.com/xlSort02.html
from Debra Dalgleish's site.

It puts some rectangles over the cells in the header row and then allows the
user to just click on that rectangle to sort the whole range by that column.

You may have to do a little work to help set it up, though.

If you're new to macros, you may want to read David McRitchie's intro at:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/getstarted.htm



wrote:

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.

--

Dave Peterson