Excel 2007: Screenupdating=false triggering randomly

**telyni** · 08-19-2009, 04:51 PM

Is there any key combination or non-code trigger for the effect usually caused by the VBA statement Application.ScreenUpdating = False?

Multiple times within the past few weeks I've been doing something ordinary in an Excel document such as running a Find, and suddenly the screen will stop updating. I can always fix it by opening up the code editor (alt+F11) and entering Application.ScreenUpdating = True into the immediate window. But I want to know why this keeps happening and if there's a way to prevent it.

As far as I know, there is no user-created code/macros running at the time. I know for sure the last one that I was working in when it happened had no code attached.

Thanks,
~telyni

**Phil_V** · 08-20-2009, 03:40 AM

It's possible that Excel is just 'to busy' to repaint the screen I guess.

Before just doing a Application.ScreenUpdating=True to fix it, it might be worth first doing the following just to be sure that it HAS actually been disabled:

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**telyni** · 08-20-2009, 11:26 AM

Thanks, I'll try that.

I can't imagine it's actually too busy though. I've tried waiting several minutes, switching to another application and back again, etc, and nothing seemed to help. Also, everything else in the window seems to work fine, as in, I can switch to different menus on the Ribbon, close or reopen my Find window, etc. And if I do things that are intended to alter cells in the window, then once I re-enable screenupdating, I find that everything I did took effect, except that I couldn't see it at the time.

**Phil_V** · 08-21-2009, 03:50 AM

Very strange...

Will be interested to hear the outcome and/or if you find the reason behind it

**romperstomper** · 08-21-2009, 06:02 AM

I've seen a few mentions of behaviour like that in 2007 - screens going blank, even though the data can be seen in the formula bar, for example. Never seems to be a definitive cause, but a few people have mentioned that paging up and down often refreshes the display.

**telyni** · 08-24-2009, 11:28 AM

Well, I think it happened again. I tried checking whether screenupdating was disabled using the offered code, and Excel announced that screenupdating was, in fact, enabled. The odd thing was that immediately, control of the file was reestablished as well, so that it didn't act disabled any more.

Theories:
-I was imagining it this time and it didn't have a problem, so screenupdating was enabled the whole time (unlikely).

-I wasn't imagining things, but the problem isn't screenupdating, but something else that happened to resolve itself at the same time I asked for the status of screenupdating, which reported enabled because it was enabled the whole time (probably unlikely because specifically reenabling screenupdating has fixed the problem, at least temporarily).

-Accessing the flag to determine the status of screenupdating nudged Excel enough to knock it out of whatever problem it was having and caused screenupdating to become enabled again (likely, but inexplicable). This also implies that screenupdating is a symptom of something else gone wrong, not the problem itself.

Thoughts?

By the way, I think cells going blank is a different problem. I get some or all of the displayed rows of data in a file going blank almost every day, particularly files where I have relatively large tables (more than 100 rows of data) and scroll back and forth within the table a lot. Highlighting those rows or paging back and forth restores visibility without a problem. In that case, the file is never unresponsive and doesn't lose any data; it's simply forgetful of what data it's supposed to be displaying for some reason. My theory on that is that there's a memory leak somewhere.