Thread: how to activate greyed out ribbon items?

I would like to restore some important functionality in Excel 2007 which has become disabled for a spreadsheet which I saved in different file formats.

I opened an Excel 2003 file with Excel 2007 and used 'Save As' into different formats (default, macro-enabled, binary) to see the resulting file size.

A number of Ribbon items are now greyed out for this file, including,
- Insert - Tables, Illustrations, charts, etc.
- Styles - conditional formatting and Format as table,
- Formula Auditing
- Data - just about all of them
- View - some of the Window items.
Also, I cannot resize or move a button on a worksheet.

Attempts to 'Save As' into the Excel 2003 format cause Excel 2007 to hang.

What caused so many features to become disabled?
How do I restore them?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Opened an older .xls file with conditional formatting in 2007, saved in 2007, saved as in 2003 format when I realized it had to be available to others without 2007, deleted the 2007 version.

When I open it in 2007 (the only version on my machine) it opens in compatability mode with the same options grayed out. Conditional formatting got messed up along the way and I can't clear or correct it now.

Did you ever get a better answer to your questions (why did it happen and how do you restore the buttons)?

AlbertK, I think it is the exact same behaviour.

Short answer: No, I still don't have an explanation.

But I do keep looking for one. I checked the Microsoft website, various technical books, and tried a few web searches, then posted the question to this forum. Along the way I learned a few things about the features of different file formats, but precious little about limitations that might cause this behaviour.

I wondered if there wasn't some attribute that could be toggled to restore the functionality in the ribbon (So many attributes are under user control, all you have to do is find the checkbox).

I am not blocked by this ribbon behaviour, because I just go back to earlier versions of the file.

I would like to understand why so I can avoid the limitation in the future. ALso, is this limited to Excel, or can I expect similar behaviour in the other components of Office-2007.

I found this behavior went away when I removed sharing permissions for the file. Why don't you see if that works for you too, Techboy? If so, I think we'll be able to consider this solved.

I found this behavior went away when I removed sharing permissions for the file (Review tab-->Share Workbook-->uncheck "Allow changes by more than one user at the same time").

Why don't you see if that works for you too, Techboy? If so, I think we'll be able to consider this solved.

Solved.
Thank you.

I noticed that this was marked solved, but I had a similar problem with the same symptoms, but a different solution, and felt this information might help someone else with the same issue.

Somehow, after saving a 2007 spreadsheet as .xls in compatibility mode, most everything was greyed out for me. However, after disabling compatibility mode, this was still an issue. My workbook was -not- shared, and not protected. I found out that somehow, all of my sheets had become 'grouped', which was preventing me from using most of the options in the ribbon.

This 'group' mode can be identified by the following next to the name of the file in the title bar of the window:

<filename.xlsx> [GROUP]

To remove this, I right-clicked on the active sheet at the bottom of the screen and chose 'Ungroup sheets'.

This brought back all the grayed out items in my ribbon once more.

Cheers.

The above solution worked for me as well. Most of the other treads talked about the sheet protection, but in my case as well the sheets had become grouped.

Thanks for the information.