Need some help!! or am i going crazy!?

[bennyboi69]

Hi,
So over the last couple of months a co-worker of mine has been having some rather strange problems with Excel 2007, she will be working on a spreadsheet with Vlookups, pivot tables and formulas in (Bare with me im not amazingly great with Excel) so she will be working away with the sheet, it will come to saving it, then once its saved all fine she will re-open it next day or whenever she needs to reuse it again and all the formatting of the spreadsheets will change upon opening... by formatting i mean; text font, text color, gridlines, cell formatting from currency to numbers decimal places being added and so on... this orginally started on just one spread sheet but is now affecting all of her spreadsheets.

Any help would be much appreciated

Ben

 

[Joe4]

Welcome to the Board!

A few questions...

1. What version of Excel is she using?
2. What kind of Excel file is she saving the file as (what is the file extension)?
3. Is there any VBA/macros in the workbook?
4. Is anyone else using/updating the file?

 

[bennyboi69]

she is using Excel 2007.
She is saving in .xlsx format.
no VBA/Marco running
and no she is the only person that amends the spread sheet.

Ben

 

[Joe4]

That is an odd one. I haven't heard of that.

I don't really know what else to consider. Are they attempting to use "Styles" in formatting?

 

[bennyboi69]

Nope not using any styles....even the grid lines on a pivot table have disappeared.

Its almost as if excel is in some sort of recovery mode as all cell formatting has gone and all grid lines have gone all text is the same font and size whereas before it was different

 

[bennyboi69]

so after much head scratching and hair pulling i can only see two possible things that might be causing this;

1) some of these spreadsheets were created over a year and a half ago back on Excel 2003. we had a system upgrade which brought Excel 2007 into play and thus (a couple of months later) this problem.

2) a server in which majority of these reports are created is still running Office 2003, the data is being pulled from a case management's database then put into Excel 2003 and emailed to the user, which has Office 2007.

what do you guys think?

 

[Joe4]

Different people using different formats could definitely cause formatting differences.

 

[bennyboi69]

But its only one person using the spreadsheets

 

[Joe4]

2) a server in which majority of these reports are created is still running Office 2003, the data is being pulled from a case management's database then put into Excel 2003 and emailed to the user, which has Office 2007.

I guess I should have clarified it by saying that opening the workbook in different version of Excel (2003 v. 2007) could cause that.

So if the the file is created in 2003, it must not have an "xlsx" extension initially, right? The person opening/editing it is converting it/saving it to "xlsx".

This may seem fairly obvious, but I will mention it anyway. I would question, are they really opening the last saved version they editied, or are they re-opening the original or a new copy created by the server?

 

[bennyboi69]

Yes they are opening the last saved version of the spreadsheet, as this spreadsheet is a management accounts sheet running monthly.