Excel 2007 : Formula Auditing | Trace function disabled

[Enquire]

Hello,

I am working on a spreadsheet developed by someone else. For some time, the only problem I had was fixing problems by previous editors.

Then, without warning, the Formula Auditing | Trace function is disabled (dimmed) ... and I have no idea why. The last significant edit I did was to break-up several tables on one tab into several tabs (one per table) and delete the (now empty) old tab. It seemed fine when I last had the file open, but the next time I opened the file, the Formula Auditing is disabled (only Show Formulas button working).

I found something on Google (Excel 2003) suggesting to un-hide objects ... but I can't find anything related to that for Excel 2007, so not sure if this is helpful or not.

Any ideas what I can do to fix this?

Thanks in advance,

Enquire
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[romperstomper]

You don't have multiple tabs selected?

[Enquire]

You don't have multiple tabs selected?

Hmmm, it seems you hit the nail on the head. The last previous thing I did was to print all (but one) of the tabs (select all of the tabs, bar one). In this case, I would EXPECT "select all tabs" to be cancelled the moment I clicked on just one tab, any tab. It didn't. However, after reading your note, I clicked on the one tab that was NOT printed, and the problem was solved.

Thank you very much. This was driving me nuts for over two hours.

Perhaps I would have figured it out myself earlier, but when you select a tab (or multiple tabs), the colour change is relatively subtle, so I was not really picking-up on the fact that multiple tabs were still selected. I also noted, that they only way to "unselect" multiple tabs was to click on a tab that was not selected. What would I have done if ALL the tabs were selected?!? In Windows GUI, when multiple objects are selected, the multiple selection is replaced by the single selection when you click on one object except, apparently, when you select multiple tabs... SIGH...

That probably also explains another issue that happened previously, when I managed to merge cells on different tabs ... something that I thought was impossible before now.

Thanks, now I can have a fresh start in the morning...

[romperstomper]

You should also see [Group] in the title bar after the file name when you have multiple tabs selected.
You can Shift+Click the active sheet tab to deselect all the others.

[Enquire]

Thanks for solving this for me. I have been using spreadsheets since Lotus 1-2-3, many quite complex, but I have never before run into this issue, which I found massively frustrating.

The visual indication on the tabs themselves that multiple tabs are selected is really quite subtle, so I never noticed it. The [Group] indication in the title bar is practically useless, because I don't expect to see a notification there and, anyway, it is (actually) as far away as it is possible to get from the tabs themselves, which are at the bottom of the window, not the top.

A far more practical and intuitive solution would be to outline selected tabs in red or some similar visual indication that emphasized the selected (grouped) tabs. This would be similar in the way that groups of cells are outlined when selected.

The only reason that some of the tabs were grouped in the first place was so that I could print the selected tabs. I never expected the grouping to be persistent. In any event, I would have expected the grouping to be deselected the moment I click on a specific tab (in much the same way a group of cells are deselected the moment you click on a specific sell without holding down either [Shift] or [Ctrl]).

Again, thanks for your help getting past this idiosyncratic issue.

Enquire
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