How to shorten a spreadsheet

[Slipface]

Yes.

Sent it to you yesterday
_d

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Sent it to you yesterday

Got it. I'll try it on my test machine tomorrow.

 

[Posterizer]

Got it. I'll try it on my test machine tomorrow.

I just discovered something that might be related to this. I have
comments in a few cells. For some reason, some of them are misbehaving
very badly. When hoving the mouse over, the window that pops up may be
narrow but tens of thousands of rows long, with no visible content.
When ctrl-clicking and selecting "edit comment", the editable part is
(in one instance) down around row 45000. How weird is that. When I
select "show comment" on one cell, the arrow disappears down the sheet
tens of thousands of rows and ends in nothing (no comment box, just the
end of the arrow).

I have to wonder if this has anything to do with 1) my inability to
delete the excess rows, and 2) the occasional error I get when trying to
hide rows, when it says "cannot shift objects off sheet" (although I
never try to hide rows that actually contain any comments).

This is quite the monster. I've begun deleting comments that are
screwed up like this, and re-inserting them. Maybe it will eventually
fix it, but then the problem becomes one of explaining why my comments
are getting screwed up like this.

And just yesterday my version of Excel at my work started giving me "out
of memory" messages and occasionally crashing while working on this
sheet. I'm losing hope!
_d

 

[JE McGimpsey]

This is quite the monster. I've begun deleting comments that are
screwed up like this, and re-inserting them. Maybe it will eventually
fix it, but then the problem becomes one of explaining why my comments
are getting screwed up like this.

And just yesterday my version of Excel at my work started giving me "out
of memory" messages and occasionally crashing while working on this
sheet. I'm losing hope!

I think it's VERY unlikely that this workbook will fix itself. There's
definitely something funky going on such that XL doesn't think that rows
below your data are empty.

Doing a straight SaveAs out of XL won't fix anything - the copy will be
too good.

Since things are getting worse, there's a few things I can recommend (I
may have made these before, I don't remember), in the order I'd try them:

1) You can try opening it in OpenOffice and doing a SaveAs. I've had
success with this at times. My current favorite flavor of OpenOffice is
NeoOffice:

http://www.neooffice.org/

Version 1.2.2 was just released today - I've used the previous builds
with no problem.

2) Do the same thing using WinXL2003, which has better error correction
(though I've not had nearly as much success with that).

3) Create a fresh workbook. Copy the contents of the errant workbook to
the new one. Do NOT move sheets from one workbook to another, instead
use Copy/Paste. Don't copy entire rows or columns. You can paste, then
Edit/Paste Special/Formats if all the formats don't come through.

 

[Slipface]

Since things are getting worse, there's a few things I can recommend (I
may have made these before, I don't remember), in the order I'd try them:

1) You can try opening it in OpenOffice and doing a SaveAs. I've had
success with this at times. My current favorite flavor of OpenOffice is
NeoOffice:

http://www.neooffice.org/

Version 1.2.2 was just released today - I've used the previous builds
with no problem.

2) Do the same thing using WinXL2003, which has better error correction
(though I've not had nearly as much success with that).

3) Create a fresh workbook. Copy the contents of the errant workbook to
the new one. Do NOT move sheets from one workbook to another, instead
use Copy/Paste. Don't copy entire rows or columns. You can paste, then
Edit/Paste Special/Formats if all the formats don't come through.

Ok, thanks for the suggestions (and for looking at the doc yourself).
When you suggest save-as from within different app, are you suggesting
that I may have to continue working on it in that app, or that it may
solve whatever bugs this doc has, such that I could go back to working
in it in Excel?

thanks,
_d

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Ok, thanks for the suggestions (and for looking at the doc yourself).
When you suggest save-as from within different app, are you suggesting
that I may have to continue working on it in that app, or that it may
solve whatever bugs this doc has, such that I could go back to working
in it in Excel?

I'd try working doing the save-as in another app, then trying it back in
XL (though NeoOffice is a perfectly adequate spreadsheet).