Excel 2003 crash on reference to another sheet

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I have had two separate cases of Excel crashing and closing with an unexplained error when a formula references a cell in another sheet of the same spreadsheet. I can always replicate the problem in that spreadsheet, but never anywhere else. The spreadsheets are not large (1 is 500KB and 14 sheets, the other 80KB and 6 sheets). The formulae I was using were very simple arithmetic. I am using Excel 2003 SP and Windows XP SP3, both fully patched.

Has anyone identified where this problem arises, so that I can try to avoid it in future? I have sent reports to Microsoft, but……

Cheers

Chris B

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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The workbook has probably become corrupt – you may have to reconstruct it.
You can copy all cells (or the used range) of a worksheet into a new workbook, but you shouldn’t copy a sheet as a whole – that is likely to copy the corruption too.

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I am not convinced. In one case I had to rebuild anyway, since I had not saved for an hour. In the other, I continued using it with a bodge to achieve what I wanted. In any case, Excel itself thought it had a problem, since it “called home”.

I will try it in Excel 2007 in a bit, to see if the same thing happens.

Chris

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Just tried to do the same thing on the same spreadsheet in Excel 2007 and it worked fine. Looks like an Excel 2003 bug, methinks.

Chris B

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Do you have update KB 973475 installed? That seems to be one of the many bugs with that particular update.

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Do you have update KB 973475 installed? That seems to be one of the many bugs with that particular update.

Rory – what a brilliant “get”. I did indeed install it on 12 Nov, and as far as I can see my first problems occurred on 20 Nov. This particular bug, I find after your prompt, is documented in
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973475.

I tested on one of the spreadsheets, disabling freeze frames per the MS article, and the formula worked without a crash. I will stick with this workaround unless the problem occurs too often, in which case I will uninstall KB973475.

Many thanks for your help.

Chris

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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