Excel will no longer launch on my Macbook Pro

[bdp]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Processor: Intel As of this afternoon excel will no longer launch on my mac.

The excel program is from the 2008 Office for Mac Student Edition and my computer is a late 2008 15" Macbook pro (purchased in 7/2009). Prior to today, excel has worked consistently since 7/2009.

(1)This failure to launch applies to all user accounts on my mac.
(2)I can not find an excel.plist type file in my library/preferences directory or in the Office preferences directory.
(3)Based on previous threads I have tried
(a) depressing the shift key prior to, during and following an attempt to open excel (from finder) and
(b) (i) depressing the shift key prior to, during and following logging on to my account and following this log on (ii) depressing the shift key prior to, during and following an attempt to open excel (from finder). Neither (3) (a) or (b) resulted in excel launching.
(4) Each time I attempt to launch excel the green excel logo sheet pops up, disappears and a blank white sheet appears (which looks like a partial spreadsheet - but without the lines or menu bar) This blank white sheet does however have about 4 icons at the top (wordart, chart etc). Following the appearance of this blank white sheet, a small, spinning, multicolored circular icon appears (the mac symbol for "working" I believe) and continues until I lose patience (at a minimum 1 minute up to 5 minutes) at which time I force quit.
(5) Sometime this afternoon I attempted to download a free disc label print program from apple.com, which downloaded, installed but never did launch.

Any help on getting excel to launch would be much appreciated. Thank you. bdp

 

[CyberTaz]

You don't indicate having addressed the two number one causes of such
behavior -- lack of applying the most current Updates & need to Repair Disk
Permissions. Make sure Office is fully updated (12.2.3), that OS X is fully
updated (10.5.8), then repair disk permissions & restart your Mac. It may
also be a good idea to retrieve the OS X Leopard 10.5.8 Combo update from
Apple Downloads & re-apply it.

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

 

[XinXin]

In addition to what Bob suggested, try run font book to repair corrupted fonts or remove duplicated fonts.

Thanks,
XinXin Liu
Test Lead, Macintosh Business Unit, Microsoft

 

[lbolter]

I am having the same problem with Excel on a MacBook Pro running 10.5.8. I've tried the suggestions with no results (repair permissions, udate Office, check for corrupt fonts). Any additional help would be very much appreciated.

lbolter

 

[John McGhie]

Delete the following folder, and see if that fixes it:

User/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008

It will be re-built when you next run any member of the Office family.

Cheers

I am having the same problem with Excel on a MacBook Pro running 10.5.8. I've
tried the suggestions with no results (repair permissions, udate Office, check
for corrupt fonts). Any additional help would be very much appreciated.

lbolter

This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!

 

[lbolter]

Thanks John. I thought about that last night after I turned off my computer. Tried that this morning and it worked. Yay!