So I was messing with a spreadsheet last night, and Excel kept crashing when I tried to put anything into a particular cell in this sheet. Very annoying and not to mention consistent — it crashed out every time I tried the cell, and I finally decided to do the little Windows XP “Log this error with Microsoft” thing.
It comes back with ‘Do you want to check for updates that will fix your problem?’
Sure dude, knock yourself out. [click] (By this point, I had copied all the data into a new spreadsheet and was working on it there, where the cell-crash wasn’t happening.)
A few minutes later:
Found Microsoft Office 2000 Professional SP1. Upgrade?
*sigh*, followed by saving work and exiting Excel (which I normally wouldn’t do until it told me to, but I wanted it to go well)
“Sure.” [click]
Install the upgrade, reboot.
Click on the excel doc in my recent viewed docs area; you know, the new one I’d just created that wasn’t giving me any problems?
Excel opens and immediately crashes. As in, the spreadsheet barely flashed on the screen.
Shite.
A classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result the second time. I say it’s a classic (read: outdated) definition because contemporary computer techs would by insane be prerequisite if this were accurate.
Anyway, I try again. Same result.
Okay, let’s just open Excel and …
Crash.
With a sinking feeling I open Word (since it was an upgrade for the whole Office suite) and …
Crash.
Nice. So I uninstall Office with the intention of either reinstalling it or the (free) Linux OpenOffice.
In the meantime, just for fun, I open up Quattro Pro (my Dell machine came from the factory with Corel Office) and point it at the excel document.
Works. Friggin’. Perfectly.
I even opened up the original .xls that was crashing when I modified the one cell; that worked fine too.
So I never got around to reinstalling Office last night.
