Excel causes system freeze

[Pat McMillan]

Thanks. Yes, we are aware of the CGBitmapContextGetData: invalid context
spew to the console. I'm not sure when we'll be able to provide a fix for
that, but I'm keeping track of the number of reports we get on it.

Thanks,

Pat

 

[Keith Sterling]

June 5th is the last response and guess what Microsoft are doing nothing about it. The only app to crash on my Mac is Excel.

So easy to reproduce, just open a Workbook that was saved as Maximised and boom Microsoft kills my Mac, cheers guys

Started opening all my Workbooks with NeoOffice now, opens everytime, never crashes, never kills my Mac.

How about treating us as customers who actually paid money for a product which doesn't work. Can I have my money back please, or shall I just continue to use NeoOffice and bin Excel

 

[roblake]

Keith Sterling asked:
"How about treating us as customers who actually paid money for a product which doesn't work. Can I have my money back please, ... "

Yes, you can. I did. There is a form somewhere on the Microsoft site that you fill out and send in.

 

[Jonathan Robinson]

Hi Pat
Just opening Excel 1008 caused 97 lines of:

"06/06/2008 07:00:38 Microsoft Excel[8279] CGBitmapContextGetData: invalid context"

I get thousands when I am using the application.

I am running 10.5.3 and Office 2008 SP1.

Would you like me to send you a system profile (I have the NVIDA graphics card).

If this is an Apple bug as you wrote further up this thread do you have a Bug ID that I can chase Apple about. I paid a fortune for a top of the range Mac pro and am very unhappy about this.
Thanks for your help.

 

[CyberTaz]

Here ya go Keith - but we have nothing to do with refunds or anything of the
like here. We're just users like everyone else, so if you have any corporate
policy issues you'll find what you need on the MS site, not in a newsgroup:

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/productrefund/refund.mspx

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Pat McMillan]

Keith,

I appreciate your frustration. But perhaps you've misunderstood the previous
discussion on this. Microsoft worked hard for several months to gather data
on this system freeze bug, posted a bug to Apple since we determined that it
was an OS bug, and checked in regularly with Apple over the last few months
letting them know how painful this bug was to our customers.

Via the channels we have with Apple, they told us that the bug was fixed in
10.5.3. Once 10.5.3 was released, I sent mail to this newsgroup as well as
to a couple of dozen customer who had reported this bug to us directly
asking them to let me know if upgrading to 10.5.3 resolved the bug for them.

So far, 99% of the people who have replied to me have told me that the
10.5.3 update has resolved the problem for them.

So, if you are still experiencing this system freeze after upgrading to
10.5.3, we certainly want to know.

Now, if just Excel is crashing (not the system), we want to help. But I will
need more information. Could you explain the scenario in which Excel is
crashing? Could you click on More Information in the Microsoft Error
Reporting tool, then copy and paste the crash log and email it to me
([email protected])?

I hope it's clear from this that Microsoft is listening and wants to help.

Thanks,

Pat

 

[Pat McMillan]

Hi Jonathan,

The CGBitmapContextGetData: invalid context messages in the console do not
have any negative functional impacts on the Office applications. We do have
a bug tracking this and hope to fix it in a future release. Just to be sure,
outside of cluttering up your console, are these messages causing other
problems for you?

Thanks,

Pat

Hi Pat
Just opening Excel 1008 caused 97 lines of:

"06/06/2008 07:00:38 Microsoft Excel[8279] CGBitmapContextGetData: invalid
context"

I get thousands when I am using the application.

I am running 10.5.3 and Office 2008 SP1.

Would you like me to send you a system profile (I have the NVIDA graphics
card).

If this is an Apple bug as you wrote further up this thread do you have a Bug
ID that I can chase Apple about. I paid a fortune for a top of the range Mac
pro and am very unhappy about this.
Thanks for your help.

 

[Jonathan Robinson]

Hello Pat

Thanks for the follow up - Its very much appreciated that someone is listening to customers issues.

To be honest I though this error and the system freeze were the same bug, I was still getting the errors after 10.5.3 so assumed the worst.

I have used Excel over the last few days and have not had any freezes, so for me 10.5.3 seems to have worked.

Looking forward to the "stop writing 10 of thousand of lines in my console log!

Thanks

 

[dave.tmccl]

June 5th is the last response and guess what Microsoft are doing nothing about it. The only app to crash on my Mac is Excel.

So easy to reproduce, just open a Workbook that was saved as Maximised andboom Microsoft kills my Mac, cheers guys

Started opening all my Workbooks with NeoOffice now, opens everytime, never crashes, never kills my Mac.

How about treating us as customers who actually paid money for a product which doesn't work. Can I have my money back please, or shall I just continueto use NeoOffice and bin Excel

Have you installed office SP1 and Mac 10.5.3? - it cured my freeze
problems with Excel

 

[Vasil]

Now in response to this message I can say from my experience that despite Mac 10.5.3. and SP 1 installed on my iMac which has an ATI Radeon card, Excel continue to freeze happily over and over. As you can imagine for those of us who rely on their computers to do some significant job this is really frustrating.

 

[Jesse]

Happens here as well using Mac Office 2004 (fully patched) on a Mac Mini with 1GB RAM and Leopard (also fully patched). Excel crashes and system must be restarted. Word also acts flakey, doing a save as to a network volume causes issues. I have tried a clean erase/reinstall of Leopard with no luck... any ideas? :frown:

 

[Todd Aton]

I can understand your frustration. I have three Macs that I depend on to get
my work done and it's painful when one or more of them aren't cooperating.
Are you getting the spinning ball or the Error Reporting dialog when Excel
freezes? Can you describe to me what you're doing prior to Excel freezing
happily over and over?

Todd Aton
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft makes no warranties, express, implied or statutory, as to the
information in this post.

 

[Todd Aton]

Sorry about that. Can you describe what you're doing in Excel prior to the
crash?

Todd Aton
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft makes no warranties, express, implied or statutory, as to the
information in this post.

 

[n.napier]

--
Pat McMillan
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corp.
This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hello Pat,

I'm a new mac user and have just discovered this group.

My problem is similar to that described, but not exactly so. If you
could point me in the right direction for help that would be great.

Basically Excel performs very sluggishly. Excel opens OK, but the
Open Recent... option can take a few seconds to list the files. The
selected file then opens OK, but entering data into a cell and moving
between cells can take seconds (up to 5 or 6) and the spinning ball
appears. Then things speed up a bit, and then slow down. Its very
frustrating.

When troubleshooting I looked at the Console and saw hundreds of
the ... Microsoft Excel[3644] CGBitmapContextGetData: invalid context
error messages, and initially thought this may be the issue. But from
what I read on this forum that isn't the case.

Any thoughts? I have a 6 month old iMac 20" and have 3gig of Ram, so
have ruled this out.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Tosh