The Technical Exorcist

March 3rd, 2007

Odd Microsoft Office Problems

Posted by exorcist in Software

I’ve encountered two Microsoft Office problems recently that were peculiar enough that I decided the solutions would be worth sharing. Let me know if this helps you!

The first one was in Excel 2000. The Save As menu option errored out claiming that it could not find GWXL97.xla. The Save, close, and a few other options were greyed out as well. Excel was effectively crippled. A full re-install did nothing to help. Neither did deleting the MRU lists. Thanks to google, I was able to find the solution. Apparently Novell Groupwise will sometimes corrupt the toolbars, creating this behavior. The solution was to reset all the toolbars. More information can be found here.

The second problem was in Word. Every time formatting was applied to an individual word, it was applied to the whole document. The user was dealing with the problem by applying the formatting, and then hitting the undo button so that only the text she wanted bold was bolded. Re-installation did not help. Once again, an appropriately worded Google search turned up the answer. Apparently, due to some quirk, the Normal paragraph style was set to automatically update when you changed formatting. Changing it back fixed the issue. Detailed instructions are available here.

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