Some Pretty Bizarre Excel Behavior (Mac-based)

Posted Sat, Jul 4 2009 19:32 by Nate Oliver

Macs are the rage, right? Stable, intuitive, splashy looking? Unless you're me - I don't use them - perhaps a subject for another day. But, I do have friends who do, and while I give them an ear-load for doing so, so be it.

I recently received a fairly strange email from a friend of mine, using Excel, in an Office 2004 environment:

"I have an excel file open with multiple tabs, but all of the tab titles are blank with the exception of the one on the screen.  It happened after I copied one of them, and now all excel files I open with multiple tabs have the same issue."

Ce qui? Having never seen anything quite like this, I figured, either someone had a long night out on the town, or something freakish happened. My advice? Reboot your machine and try that again.

No good - to my surprise, not only did the issue persist, I actually got a screen-shot of it, here:

 

 

I've blurred out the cells' text to protect the innocent, but I didn't play games with Worksheets 2-4 tab names. Notice how they have no names, what-so-ever? Another issue with this Workbook is that the cell-formatting isn't correct in the Worksheets, either.

This is strange stuff. I've heard the song about having dessert on a horse with no name, but snacking while staring at a Worksheet with no name? This is new to me and, apparently, for real.

Not having a Mac close-by, where I could even attempt to replicate this strange phenomenon, I decided to scour the WWW. Oddly enough, while limited, I did get some pings, e.g.,

http://forum.soft32.com/mac/thread-sheet-tabs-ftopict82279.html

"I now noticed that if the file is double clicked to start Excel the blank sheet tabs (not really blank, just white text) will appear as with all subsequent files opened."

And the big one:

http://forum.soft32.com/mac/Text-disappears-worksheet-tabs-ftopict82593.html

"I discovered that it was due to a conflich with Acrobat's PDF Maker plug-in which was in the Excel startup folder. Once I removed it, the problem disappeared."

Spelling and terminology aside, it turns out that the Acrobat Distiller Add-in was the issue, in this case. Once she unloaded that, everything works as expected. Two thoughts:

  1. This only appears to be a problem with specific Excel files, although it can daisy-chain to other files in the same Excel instance
  2. This isn't to say all Add-ins are bad news, but some might cause problems

Part of me wonders how this Add-in managed to create this scenario? It's not normal, to say the least - is it a neat trick? I've never seen this on a PC, so I assume most readers will never run into this, and your chances of seeing this are probably slim on a Mac, as well.

This is on my top-5 of weird, unexpected, things seen in Excel, before.

Happy 4th of July!

Comments

# re: Some Pretty Bizarre Excel Behavior (Mac-based)

Sunday, July 05, 2009 10:48 AM by Mike Rosenblum

Hi Nate,

Great blog, by the way. Keep up the good work...

I don't know how the tabs could be blanked out, of course, but I have heard about add-ins to Excel not releasing references properly and therefore causing hangs. I've seen culprits cited including Google Desktop, Adobe Acrobat, and anti-virus programs.

I've not seen this myself, actually, but I believe it. I have created some test add-ins to see if you can cause a hang via an add-in, and you definitely can.

As for blanking out the worksheet tabs, though, I have absolutely no idea...

Mike

# re: Some Pretty Bizarre Excel Behavior (Mac-based)

Sunday, July 05, 2009 12:07 PM by Nate Oliver

Hi Mike,

Thanks, and thanks for checking in! I believe I won't be testing one of your said test Add-ins. ;)

I've seen similar citations in terms of Google Desktop and Adobe, and don't run either. In the case of the latter, if you have a real need for this, I'd be tempted to run it on a case-by-case basis, versus all the time.

This case strikes me as especially odd, I wouldn't know how to roll my own to do something like this. Are they doing something fairly low-level, or DOS'ing Excel's ability to redraw?

OT: I'm also a little skeptical of the Google Toolbar for IE, too, I suspect it leaks memory.

# re: Some Pretty Bizarre Excel Behavior (Mac-based)

Sunday, July 05, 2009 3:22 PM by Nate Oliver

You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the answer is C - all of the above, it's a low-level and redraw issue.

Take the following:

www.mrexcel.com/hof003.php

And the following (point 10):

"Next, I'd be looking at video and print drivers. Did the user install a new printer? Those all in one types are constantly causing us grief. Now I've got to do some damage control because often their drivers aren't compatible with XP for example. I might try a different printer driver. (I know this seems weird to some but here's the reason--Excel is actually a raster graphics program as opposed to say Word which uses vector graphics. The printer driver is crucial to the display of the spreadsheet. The video driver can also come into play but not as often.) "

This particular Add-in acts like a Print-driver - it Prints to files.

I've seen this before, if you get it wrong (not compatible) with your Print-driver, in Excel, you're in trouble - it causes all kinds of weird issues. Problems ranging from terrible performance to inadequate screen redraw, e.g., Print Preview.

# re: Some Pretty Bizarre Excel Behavior (Mac-based)

Monday, July 06, 2009 6:09 PM by Mike Rosenblum

Amazing.

No, I really have no idea. How a print driver would affect screen redraw is definitely outside my knowledge area...

Definitely weird though. And I guess not Excel-specific. One might ask why only the tabs are (apparently) the only thing affected. Shouldn't other windows and controls also be affected by this? Odd...

# re: Some Pretty Bizarre Excel Behavior (Mac-based)

Tuesday, July 07, 2009 3:55 PM by Nate Oliver

Hi Mike,

Perhaps not Excel-specific. But, I'd read what he's saying closely, as he's saying the Print-driver won't affect Vector graphics-based programs (as much?).

It depends on what driver is creating the redraw, and in Excel, the Print-driver is critical. And, also, in this case, it wasn't just the tabs that were affected, the cell-formatting was incorrect, too.

I really have seen non-compatible Print-drivers cause really strange behavior. I wrote a procedure that ran in about 30 minutes; it sounds long, it was a very iterative process to create several hundred Workbooks (reports).

I got a call, asking me why my procedure had blown up to take over 2 hours. I don't know why, but I flipped into Print Preview, and the max DPI was 300 DPI - which is too light - not a good driver. It couldn't even redraw in Print Preview, properly.

By changing the driver, you're back into a normal realm, 600 DPI. And the procedure then drops back down to 30 minutes, or so. It's beyond me, too; I don't understand what's happening under the hood, I just keep it in mind.

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