I have a strange problem. Occurs under both Excel 2002 SP2 and SP3. I have
an application with fairly extensive macros. At some point in using, the
leftmost 25% or so of the Excel work area including row numbers, column
headings, down to but not including the status bar at the bottom, is shaded
out in the same color as set for the Excel menu, toolbars. column headings,
etc.

I am pretty sure it has happened on my PC which has SP2, but not recently.
Now it is mostly causing a problem for some on SP3. Any thoughts??? Thanks.

Hi Larry

Don't assume the lack of responses means you are imagining this. I
inheritied a spreadsheet which intermittently presented exactly the same
problem. Right clicking on the grey area brought up a short cut menu
"Customize" leading me to assume this was some kind of toolbar. However
the only way I could get rid of it was to restart Excel.

The macro involved was a button click event from a controls toolbox
button which copied a master sheet, reformatted the new sheet and made
some changes to the sheet holding the button. I cleaned up the code
extensively making sure to use object variables for all the processing
and removing all .select and .activate commands. In the process of doing
this the problem seems to have gone away. P.S. Excel 2002 SP2, Windows
2000 SP4.

There was another post about a month ago, again stating exactly the same
problem but I don't think it got any replies and I can't find it now
using Google Search. I didn't reply because at that stage I had no idea
what was causing the problem or how to solve it (not that I have much
more of a clue now).

This is a link to a similar problem which was resolved using:
Application.CommandBars("Task Pane").Visible = True and then
Application.CommandBars("Task Pane").Visible = False
presumably at the end of the macro. http://tinyurl.com/7wefl
Unfortunately I can no longer replicate the problem to test if this
would work in my case but maybe it will work for you.

I would be very interested to hear if you have any success with this.

Good luck
Rowan

Larry A wrote:
I have a strange problem. Occurs under both Excel 2002 SP2 and SP3. I have
an application with fairly extensive macros. At some point in using, the
leftmost 25% or so of the Excel work area including row numbers, column
headings, down to but not including the status bar at the bottom, is shaded
out in the same color as set for the Excel menu, toolbars. column headings,
etc.

I am pretty sure it has happened on my PC which has SP2, but not recently.
Now it is mostly causing a problem for some on SP3. Any thoughts??? Thanks.