File -> New – Looks strange? (Excel 2000)

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We are having a problem on a few machines, and want an easier fix than to reinstall Office2000 or Excel2000.

Situation: If a person goes into Excel, and then clicks on FILE -> NEW, it is supposed to display the “General” tab with Workbook, and any other templates you put in the default directory. And if you installed the sample spreadsheet solutions, you will have another tab with Spreadsheet Solutions visible.

Problem: Some people go into File -> New, and their “General” tab is squashed (see attached image file). Also, if you click on the “DETAILS” view button in this Window, all of the templates disappear, and you see zero details for the templates, not even the names of the files?

This seems to be the only issue with Excel, as all other features of Excel are working as they should.

Solution: ???? Any suggestions on correcting this aside from reinstalling? We tried the DETECT and REPAIR, and that did not correct the problem.

We have run all Office Updates (SR1a and SP2) and all hotfixes available on the Office Updates website.

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That looks like an Excel bug to me. What happens if you change the screen resolution?

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Have any of these folks changed their system font defaults, either font or point size?

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System fonts are all at the defaults and using Windows Default for the Scheme.

Changing the resolution does NOT help.

The only program this “bug” appears in is Excel. Word, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, IE, all work fine.

If we reinstall Office, the problem goes away. I am looking for an easier fix

Thanks.

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If reinstalling Office makes the problem, then you may try one other thing:

From the start menu select Run and enter

Excel.exe /regserver

That should reset all of Excel’s registry settings to their default values.

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Thanks All.

The excel.exe /regserver did not fix this

What I found is that we need to reinstall through ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS, select MS Office and choose “CHANGE”, and when presented with Maintenance Options, choose “Add/Remove Features”, and when presented with which Office components you wish to change, you choose EXCEL, and then SPREADSHEET TEMPLATES, and choose to RUN ALL FROM COMPUTER.

This procedure still requires the OFFICE CD, and only copies a few files. If only I could figure out which files this updates, I could probably correct this without having to burn several copies of the CD

Oh well….

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Also, is there any difference when they select “List” or “Details” view, as opposed to “Large Icons”?

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The “squashed” view appears that way if you click on LIST and DETAILS as well as LARGE ICONS. If you click on Details, the filenames even squash out of sight… and disappear.

This is a strange one… but hoped someone could tell me of a NORMAL.DOT file deletion to maybe recreate some Excel standard settings like you can do in Word

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There isn’t exactly an equivalent. You can try, one by one, moving Book1.xls and Linesheet.xls from …Templates, and personal.xls, if it exists, from …XLStart, restarting Excel every time to see if one of them is the guilty party. If that doesn’t help, and reinstalling fixes things, resintalling may be the only solution.

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