Can't Open Spreadsheet by Double Clicking

[shaker]

Hi, a user ran into a problem where he can no longer open excel files by double clicking on them. Excel starts but opens to a blank grey screen (not a blank spreadsheet). The user can do a File>Open to open the XLS spreadsheet.

- MS Office 2000 Standard installed
- Tried doing a repair of MS Office 2000 Standard which completed successfully
- The file association to XLS files are properly set to MS Excel.
- All other office files (Word, Powerpoint, etc) work fine.
- When I logon with a pre-established local profile that has full admin rights I don't have the problem.
- User account has Power User access to the workstation
- Tried to recreate the user profile and that didn't work

The problem appears to have something to do with either user priveleges or with the existing and/or new user profile. I don't know what else to try here exept maybe give the user admin rights to his workstation to see if that helps. Has anyone run into this problem before? TIA!!

[VBA Noob]

Hi,


Whenever you have a workbook in the XLSTART directory, it will open when XL starts. When you created the PERSONAL.XLS workbook by storing a macro in it, XL created the file, marked it as hidden and stored it in the XLSTART directory. This is the normal use of Personal.xls. Generally, people put macros in Personal.xls that they would like available to them at all times.
So I don't think you made a grave mistake, you just discovered a feature of
Excel that you hadn't used before.


Anytime you have a workbook in XLSTART and it is hidden, Excel will start
without a new workbook. That's also true of workbooks that are not hidden,
but it's a little more obvious in that case. Some people, like me, prefer
this over having a blank worksheet at startup. Deleting Personal.xls and
anything else in your XLSTART directory should have restored the behavior to
opening a blank workbook with Excel. Check the directory and make sure you
don't have any other workbooks in XLSTART that would be causing XL not to
open a blank workbook on startup.


If the directory is empty, then you might try starting Excel from the
command line. Start - Run - Excel.exe \regserver


The regserver switch at the end rewrites the registry entry, one of which
tells Excel whether to open a blank workbook. If you have more than one
version of Excel on your computer, include the path in the above command
line.

VBA Noob

[Bryan Hessey]

Hi, a user ran into a problem where he can no longer open excel files by double clicking on them. Excel starts but opens to a blank grey screen (not a blank spreadsheet). The user can do a File>Open to open the XLS spreadsheet.

- MS Office 2000 Standard installed
- Tried doing a repair of MS Office 2000 Standard which completed successfully
- The file association to XLS files are properly set to MS Excel.
- All other office files (Word, Powerpoint, etc) work fine.
- When I logon with a pre-established local profile that has full admin rights I don't have the problem.
- User account has Power User access to the workstation
- Tried to recreate the user profile and that didn't work

The problem appears to have something to do with either user priveleges or with the existing and/or new user profile. I don't know what else to try here exept maybe give the user admin rights to his workstation to see if that helps. Has anyone run into this problem before? TIA!!

Hi,

first thoughts are to Start, Run, Excel /regserver
to re-set the registry, then remove any Personal.xls and try again.

---