Undo not working (97 SR-2)

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I’m working in a new environment and the Excel I have here (97 SR2) is not letting me Undo. It’s grayed out unless I’m actually typing in a field. In that case it lets me revert to the value that I was typing over. Once I move out of the field, though, Undo is no longer accessible. Any ideas?

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Several.

First, does this happen in any new file too, or just in one of your files?

Second: when’s the last time the hard drive was cleaned up?
Edited to remove request for email

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It happens in new files too.

Hard drive probably has not been cleaned in a long while. I don’t know for sure because I just inherited this machine. There is over 1 GB free, though. I’ll send for the instructions since it can probably use a good cleaning in any case.

OS, by the way, is NT 4.0 1381. I don’t have full access to the machine so I’m wondering if it could be some sort of file systems permissions problem.

Thanks.

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Michael, two wild stabs in the dark to try:

Back up all files in C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeXLStart, then close Excel and delete all files in …XLStart and let Excel recreate Personal.xls on startup. If this helps, reinstate all the backed up files one-by-one to …XLStart to see if one recreates the problem.

Reregister Excel: at the “Start, Run” prompt box, enter, including the quotes,
“C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeExcel.exe” /regserver

If these don’t help, reinstall Excel.

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FYI, neither of these suggestions helped. There was only one file in my XLStart directory (mscreate.dir) but removing it didn’t seem to have any effect. And /regserver seems to have no effect as well. Haven’t tried the reinstall solution yet…

Thanks for trying.

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An Sheet or Workbbokm event could be invoked which impacts on the worksheets. As macro actions cannot be undone by the Undo option, that might explain it. You could check the ThisWorkbook object, and each Sheet object for any modules like Worksheet_SelectionChange etc.

If you are still having problems, upload a blank workbook which exhibits the problem so that we can take a look.

Andrew C

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Just for posterity’s sake I thought I’d let you know that this problem got solved and how. Somebody at our company’s tech support actually knew the trick. What they did was: Open up the customize toolbar dialog, drag the Undo button from the existing toolbar to remove it, then place the button back on the toolbar by dragging it from the dialog. That fixed the problem. Somehow the button had lost full functionality. As to why… I have no idea. I imagine reinstalling Excel would have fixed it too…

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…or right-clicking on the toolbar, choosing Customize… to bring up the Customize dialog box and re-setting the toolbar in question. A good reminder, too that Excel often has more than one way of performing the same command. Ctrl-Z, as well Edit | Undo [action], would still work if the toolbar button were disabled.

Did some mischievious imp put a fake Undo button on the toolbar? I wonder because my Excel won’t let me change the function associated with the real Undo button. Hm.

JohnJ

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I don’t think it was deliberately done because the Undo was partially working. It would undo text while the cursor was still in the cell where the typing took place. Just another weird footnote to the workings of the Office suite of software. I don’t remember now if I tried using Undo from the menu. Maybe not.

mc

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There may be some core instability to the Undo button. I learnt the hard way not to use it on a customised toolbar as doing so tended to cause crashes (unlike using Ctrl+Z).

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Anything checked in Tools, Add-ins?

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Do you have any event macros that change anything on the sheet? That is exactly what will happen if you have for example a Worksheet Change event macro that makes any changes on the worksheet.

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This is very possible and maybe even the likely source of the problem.
There are various macro-enhanced spreadsheets floating around here.

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