There's nothing special about Personal.xls - it's just a regular
workbook that's stored in your Startup folder. Every file in your
startup folder will be opened when XL starts up. Nor is there anything
special about the name - it's just the default name that XL gives when
you record a macro.

You can hide Personal.xls (Window/Hide), but it needs to be open in
order to run a macro from it , just like any other file.

Templates don't work the same way in Xl as they do in Word. While new
files can be made as copies of templates, templates don't stay attached
to the files. Personal.xls was never, unless you saved it as a template,
acting as a template.




In article ,
"Roger O" wrote:

I have EXCEL 2002 sp3 on WinXP. I added some of my frequently used macros
into my PERSONAL.XLS file, so that they are available with each spreadsheet
that I open. Now, everytime I start up EXCEL it automatically opens the
PERSONAL.XLS file instead of just using it as a template. The macros appear
in the toolbar just fine, but won't run since PERSONAL.XLS is open. Can
someone help me, please ? What have I done wrong ?

thanks ... Roger