Excel Xlstart folder

3626 Views 8 Replies 2 Participants Last post by Chawbacon, Sep 24, 2019

fishboy75

Discussion Starter · Jul 24, 2019

Hi All, looking for help on an issue I'm having with the personal.XLSB workbook, I'll be as clear as I can.

Long time users of Macros stored in an excel workbook saved in
C ://users/username/appdata/roaming/microsoft/excel/xlstart

Stating the obvious this workbook should open hidden but make the macros available to other open workbooks.

However having upgraded from office 2010 to office 2016 this no longer works, I get an error along the lines of excel is having trouble with the document personal.xlsb would you like to disable it, of course disabling it allows excel to open but clearly without the macros being available. Removing the personal.xlsb from the disabled items list causes excel to fail to open next launch and subsequent launches give the error above....

To eliminate the fact it was an existing workbook with existing macros from the problem I deleted the old PW from the xlstart folder (confirmed as the correct location) and recorded a new basic macro and chose personal.xlsb as the save location as prompted via excel........no difference, same issue as above.....

However if I move the workbook to say my desktop and open excel without the PW in its normal location it opens fine, if I then open the PW that opens fine too and the macros become available.

Also, if I create a new PW with new macros and save it as UNHIDDEN in it's xlstart folder it works fine, as soon as I hide it it fails to open. In fact saving any workbook unhidden in the XLSTART folder opens as it should, as soon as they are hidden they cause the issues described above?

I get the same result specifying another folder to 'at startup, open all documents in..', unhidden = OK. HIDDEN = FAIL!

Apologies if that's a bit 'waffly'! Let me know if I need to clarify anything....

Thank you!

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Chawbacon

· #2 · Aug 15, 2019

Hey there Fishboy75,

Was just reviewing posts and saw that this went unanswered. The primary issues that I have encountered around the personal.xlsb files revolve around them being locked for editing, or disabled. However, I do not want to jump to conclusions, so if you could post the full error message, that would be greatly appreciated.

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fishboy75

Discussion Starter · #3 · Aug 19, 2019

Chawbacon said:
Hey there Fishboy75,

Was just reviewing posts and saw that this went unanswered. The primary issues that I have encountered around the personal.xlsb files revolve around them being locked for editing, or disabled. However, I do not want to jump to conclusions, so if you could post the full error message, that would be greatly appreciated.

Hey, thanks for the reply - If the ersonal.XLSB workbook is unhidden then everything works fine other than the pwb being visible - If I hide then save the pwb then the next time I launch excel the program will not start, on the second attempt I get the error 'excel is running into problems with c:\\users\.........xlstart\personal.xlsb.' then I get the option to disable it, if I choose not to disable it then I can not launch excel.

I have tried, repairing the installation, completely uninstalling and reinstalling, creating a new pwb, using a known good pwb - not sure what else I can try!!

Thanks

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Chawbacon

· #4 · Aug 22, 2019

Hey there. A couple a quick tests... Trying to narrow this down a bit.

Are you attempting to open this file through Windows Explorer?

If YES, try turning off the Preview Pane within Windows Explorer and then opening the file with the XLSB hidden.

Also, is the condition reproduced when you open Excel from the Windows icon interface and then open a new blank document?

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fishboy75

Discussion Starter · #5 · Aug 22, 2019

`Hey, thanks for the assistance!

Yes, I am opening excel files within windows explorer (not file specific), turning off preview pane doesn't help unfortunately.

If I open excel from the excel icon I also have the same error - fails to launch first time and disables the PWB on the 2nd attempt

I have the same issue on two different machines that have two different users.

The only clue I have is that if I sign in to the machine as a different user everything works fine, I have 'rebuilt' the user profiles less the 'appdata' folder but that didn't work!

Thanks again!

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Chawbacon

· #6 · Aug 24, 2019

fishboy75 said:
The only clue I have is that if I sign in to the machine as a different user everything works fine,

Ah... So this indicates user profile issues! Which makes me think that the profiles might have a missing template, or a renamed custom template, in use for Excel. The default template name is specifically "book.XLTX" (NOT the old version book.XLT, or some other variation) and should be located in %appdata%\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART folder. If the book.XLTX file is missing you will need to create one. While I do not think that it would be part of this issue, it would not hurt to see if you are also missing the sheet.XLTX file while you are at it.

If the problem still exists, I personally would make a backup of the profile in question, then use an administrator account to delete the profile, restart the computer, and recreate the user profile. You should then be able to restore your files as needed.

Best of luck.

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fishboy75

Discussion Starter · #7 · Sep 5, 2019

Hey, I've tried re creating book.xltx and sheet.xltx (open a new workbook and save as book/sheet in the xlstart folder) but unfortunately I have the same issue - I know deleting the profile is probably what I need to do but i'm sooooo reluctant to as one of the affected machines is the finance directors with a LOT of custom software installs, my life would be hell if it caused more issues than it solved!

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fishboy75

Discussion Starter · #8 · Sep 24, 2019

Hi, just thought I'd update this now it's resolved, with the help of another add-in supplier we use.

"We have seen this issue in the past and the only way that we have been able to work around it was to enable some other Excel Add-Ins to try and create some spacing from when the Jet Excel Add-In loads and when the Personal.xlsb loads."

Thanks for the ideas though, appreciated.

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Chawbacon

· #9 · Sep 24, 2019

fishboy75 said:
Hi, just thought I'd update this now it's resolved, with the help of another add-in supplier we use.

"We have seen this issue in the past and the only way that we have been able to work around it was to enable some other Excel Add-Ins to try and create some spacing from when the Jet Excel Add-In loads and when the Personal.xlsb loads."

Thanks for the ideas though, appreciated.

Now that is really interesting. So the root problem... For some reason (still unknown) a race condition (between Jet Excel and Personal.xlsb) was created after a the update from Office 2010 to Office 2016 was conducted. This has the feel of a coding issue that Microsoft should probably investigate further.

Thanks for the update and I am glad that you found a work around.

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