Restoring toolbar

[MSC]

I built a few custom buttons in 2004 and added them to my Excel toolbar several months ago.

Today I ran across an old .xlb file from 1999 that a friend gave me. I doubleclicked his file, it launched Excel with his toolbar, and I then closed Excel.

I then reopened Excel, trusting I'd see my old toolbar. Instead it was now loading his toolbar, and despite searching for *.xlb, I only see his .xlb file plus factory-standard ones with save dates of years ago -- i.e. no evidence of any changes that I'd made in 2004.

Am I SOL or is there a workaround? Thank you - Mike

 

[parry]

Hi Mike, unless you overwrote the file I would have thought you should still have this file. When you did a search did you change your search options to look for hidden files and folders? I believe these type of files have a hidden attribute.

 

[MSC]

Thanks...I agree, this file should be -somewhere-.

I'm running Win 2000 professional, and the Search tool doesn't offer anything to look for hidden files. I don't recall my DOS days strongly enough to remember how to search for hidden files on my entire C:\ via that route.

However, a straight search -does- return the .xlb files I originally mentioned, so those are not hidden. I wonder if there is a different extension for toolbars than xlb.

 

[parry]

Hi again, I think its only xlb but some folders can be hidden, meaning files within them wont be returned in the results. In MyComputer select Tools|FolderOptions|View tab and ensure Show Hidden Files and Folders is selected then try the search again.

 

[Norie]

Mike

Have you checked if your toolbar is listed when you right click on the main toolbar and select Customize...?

 

[parry]

Why dont you try using System Restore to return to an earlier point, copy the file to removable media then restore back to current state. Before doing this make sure you set a Restore Point so you can easily recover to todays environment.

 

[MSC]

Regarding hidden files, I checked my settings and indeed Show Hidden Files was already selected.

Regarding rt click - Customize (from the main toolbar), I don't see my toolbar there, per se, b/c I updated the Standard & Formatting toolbars with several new buttons.

when I launch Excel now, the factory-standard toolbars appear. And when I selected both Std and Formatting toolbars and hit Reset, nothing changed.

What gets me is that Excel -at all times - uses some file to tell it which toolbars (configured in a certain fashion) to load each time Excel is opened (presumably just a .xlb file from some location). You'd think that if someone doubleclicked a different .xlb file that Excel would not simply overwrite the prior toolbar file with no recourse to retrieve it.

 

[Norie]

I don't see my toolbar there, per se, b/c I updated the Standard & Formatting toolbars with several new buttons.

Sorry I thought you meant you had created a new custom toolbar.

 

[Zack Barresse]

Hi,


Parry, a System Restore would not work, as your xlb files are not system files. Which is, afaik, the only thing that will affect.

Mike, what I would do is find this older xlb file, rename it to name.OLDxlb. Make sure your original xlb file is in the same location. If need be, delete or rename all xlb files. Excel will create on if none are found. This will also potentially speed up your Excel on startup and in general. These files can become grossly huge and overweight. A good size is about 10-20 kb. A Visual Basic Script to automatically do this can be found here by Tommy Bak.

HTH

 

[MSC]

Thanks for everyone's help.

At this point I will just re-create all my buttons: most of them ran from macros which currently still reside in my personal.xls.

and apparently there is a way to save a toolbar - I'll save my toolbar changes and hopefully never run into this problem again.

I'm just surprised that excel doesn't have a way to easily revert to a prior toolbar, esp. when one can overwrite a toolbar so easily and transparently. Or even have one location (like \xlstart\) where -all- toolbars would be stored.

Thanks again for everyone's help on this! -- Mike