Question Was 2010 Student MS Office glitched in purpose?

[ReveurGAM]

I've been using it for a long time. Yesterday or the day before, I got a notice that it's deprecated. Then, yesterday, I was updating inventory in Excel and it kept crashing. I restarted and a Windows update installed, but still Excel crashed. I ran chkdsk, but it continued to crash. Another update this morning and it crashed repeatedly. I opened the file in Open Office, no problems. Did MS deliberately make that Office unstable???

 

[helpstar]

Reinstall office

 

[Lafong]

I have been using 2010 Home and Student for about 10 years and have not encountered that issue.

Some people do report difficulties in getting it activated on a new install.

 

[Secret-Squirrel]

...............Excel crashed...............crashed repeatedly.

Do you get an error message when this happens? If you do then post it here in full.

 

[ReveurGAM]

Do you get an error message when this happens? If you do then post it here in full.

No, it starts lagging, then it freezes for several seconds, then it crashes. It happens only on certain cells. No message.

 

[Ralston18]

What is common to those "certain cells"?

 

[ReveurGAM]

What is common to those "certain cells"?

They contain text. I was working on brand and model info. On lines 127-129 it would crash. It didn't crash in OO. I made the file in Excel.

 

[Ralston18]

By lines, you mean "rows" correct? And certain cells in one of columns common to those rows crash.

How are those column formated: number, dates, text, etc...?

Are you able to copy and paste the contents or formulas of cells that do not cause crashes and cells that do crash?

Include other columns that may be related.

Likely some error: e.g., trying to add a numeric "1" to a text "2"

 

[ReveurGAM]

By lines, you mean "rows" correct? And certain cells in one of columns common to those rows crash.

How are those column formated: number, dates, text, etc...?

Are you able to copy and paste the contents or formulas of cells that do not cause crashes and cells that do crash?

Include other columns that may be related.

Likely some error: e.g., trying to add a numeric "1" to a text "2"

Sorry, rows 127-129, columns a-b. I didn't try others after several crashes and wasting hours on chkdsk and updates.

They are not formatted. They are text - no formulas.

I was pasting into them.

How? I have a lot of columns, but most are empty for those rows. Effectively, there are 8 columns in use there.

 

[Ralston18]

Text is a format.
Are columns a-b formated as "Text" versus number, date, %, etc. for all rows?

Not unusual for some rows in a column to inadvertently get misconfigured. Excel expects a certain format and if that format is not what is expected then crash...

Brand and model information may contain all sorts of characters. Excel may be "seeing" something in that entered data that Excel does not recognize or believes to be an error. And perhaps being unable to resolve that issue then simply crashes.

What copy/paste process do you use? What is the source of the copied data?

Are you able to provide examples of what is being pasted into those cells with revealing any personally identifiable information? Versus cells that do not cause crashes.

If so, then do a screen capture showing rows 120 - 140 and cell contents across all 8 columns?

Indicate cells that "crash" versus cells that do not "crash".

Post the screen capture here via imgur (www.imgur.com).

 

[ReveurGAM]

If you can please nudge me in about 4 hours, I can more completely respond.

A & B have no type formatting.

Cut and paste techniques were drag- paste and CTRL-C & -V.

I was typing/ drag-pasting "BlackNoise" into non-crashing and crashing empty cells in A and "NoiseBlocker" was being pasted or added (via pasting) into non-crashing and crashing empty and occupied cells in B.

No special text, no special characters, no formatting so, despite that I have never heard that I must format every general/text cell with its type, I think you may be onto something. Perhaps something corrupted the type.

I've never seen a sheet crash because I typed the wrong thing into a type-formatted field. It's been a long time since spreadsheets couldn't deal with incorrect input without crashing.

 

[Ralston18]

One thought was that the data being entered included an Excel reserved word. That does not seem to be the case with respect to "BlackNoise" and "NoiseBlocker".

= = = =

An entire column can be formatted and then, if necessary, individual cells within that column may be separately formatted.

Right click the column header for Column A and Column B.

From the menu select Format cells.

What format in each column?

Then do the same for cells that crash and cells that do not crash. Checking individual cell formats.

If you paste the crashing "NoiseBlocker" entry into a previously non-crashing cell (e.g., originally "BlackNoise" does the cell then crash?

Likewise if you paste NoiseBlocker into a crashing cell does the cell stop crashing?

Try adding a space between "Noise"and "Blocker". Likewise "Black" and "Noise"

Or otherwise discover some change that can flip a cell from crashing to non-crashing and vice versa.

Something that is constantly and consistently repeatable.

= = = =

Test in a copy of the spreadsheet.

Agree that Excel should handle such problems without a crash. However, there are any number of things that can happen. Especially if there are any rules etc. set up to check and prevent data entry errors.

Those rules can easily go astray sometimes.

 

[ReveurGAM]

Not only do I not have trouble in OO, I uploaded the sheet to Google Sheets and had no trouble.

As I said, there is no format assigned to A and B, or most other columns except where I set it to something numerical because I wanted a specific output (e.g. currency, no decimal place)

I attempted to format A-E & H simultaneously to "text". Excel crashed and reloaded itself.
I attempted to format ONLY A. Crashed, didn't reload. Same happened with column B.

I attempted to copy the CONTENTS ("BlackNoise") of cell 123A. After pressing enter, it crashed.

I do not have any data entry error rules set up as I haven't learned how to use them. In fact, I don't have any rules set up at all for the entire file that I can recall.

The only thing that has actually changed is that I switched from an old Dell keyboard to a Rosewill RGB that I just bought. I switched back to the Dell and tried to overwrite 123A by typing in the same thing. Crash!

Previously, please note, 123 was not a problem.

When I attempted to paste the sheet into an empty sheet...Well, you can guess.

 

[ReveurGAM]

I am currently letting Windows try to repair the installation. I will advise later.

 

[ReveurGAM]

It didn't make a difference.

 

[ReveurGAM]

@Ralston18 Sorry, I forgot to tag you. Please read my responses above.

 

[Ralston18]

No problem. Thanks.

= = = =

Look for special characters that may be in the cells:

https://www.statology.org/excel-search-for-special-characters/

https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/delete-special-unwanted-characters-excel/

Or hidden characters:

https://www.excelforum.com/excel-general/1402609-find-hidden-characters.html

Poking/googling around a bit I found this old link:

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/CellView.aspx

Premise being that there is something about the content and/or format of those cells that Excel really does not like and does not show. And those invisible characters simply come along with the copy/paste and drag/drop process from the source(s) being used to build the inventory table.


Other things to try:

In Google and OO also look for special or hidden charcters. Google and OO may be able to reveal them where Excel fails to do so and crashes in the process.

Export the subject rows and columns (or at least a representative sample) into Notepad. See if anything unusual appears.

Are you familar with Access? Another way to look at the data is to link the data to an Access table and examine the resulting table va Access. Or even import the data to Access.

= = = =

In the meantime I will take a look at Event Viewer. Objective being to find errors (crashes) related to Excel's crashing. Or some other diagnostic method more directly related to Excel errors and crashes.

 

[Ralston18]

Here is a good starter link:

https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/windows-10-crash-log.html

Do not try to immediately configure anything.

Just look through the Application & Services logs for Excel related entries.

Possibly in the Microsoft Office Alerts. (Feel free to look at any logs of interest. )

Logs could be lengthy and confusing - focus on finding relevant entries (e.g., Office or Excel mentioned) and the next step would be to decipher the error codes etc. If any.

Error codes may or may not be helpful.

 

[Ralston18]

Follow up:

Does the following Powershell cmdlet provide any results?

Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Message *Excel*

Run as Admin. (You can copy and paste the cmdlet.)

If the results are truncated as indicated by .... then use

Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Message *Excel* | out-string -width 320
A result from my computer:


PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Message *Excel* | out-string -width 320

Index Time EntryType Source InstanceID Message
----- ---- --------- ------ ---------- -------
5873 Apr 19 13:35 Warning Microsoft-Windows... 10010 Application 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE' (pid 19100) cannot be restarted - 1.
5863 Apr 19 13:28 Warning Microsoft-Windows... 10010 Application 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE' (pid 19100) cannot be restarted - 1.



PS C:\WINDOWS\system32>

 

[Grobe]

Maybe not the most helpful answer, but why not starting doing the work using Libre Office instead ?

tips: Open Office isn't actually being maintained for several years back by now.

 

[ReveurGAM]

Maybe not the most helpful answer, but why not starting doing the work using Libre Office instead ?

tips: Open Office isn't actually being maintained for several years back by now.

Ah, I didn't know OOo isn't being developed anymore. Actually, it looked to me like LO wasn't, so I went to AOO first. If you search, you'll see that they mention Apache OpenOffice and is still in development as one of the replacements for OOo, so I installed and used it first. However, AOO doesn't work right on W11. I installed it on my W10 laptop and it was fine, but when I moved to my W11 PC, it malfunctioned and W11 is known to have compatibility issues. I then tried Libre Office, MS Excel, Google Sheet and a couple others but something had damaged my original file, so I couldn't resolve the problem. I was only able to get it partially back to normal through uploading it to Zoho, and another repair was done by cutting and pasting after I moved it to Excel from Zoho. Then, I started having the aforementioned cut-n-paste problems and moved it to Google Sheets, where it has been living happily ever since.

Honestly, AOO, LO, Google Sheets and the others are, each in their own way, not quite as good as Excel.

I hope I've answered your question. Thanks for the idea!

 

[Grobe]

Honestly, AOO, LO, Google Sheets and the others are, each in their own way, not quite as good as Excel.

Yes that is a matter of personal preferences.

Personally, I'd prefer Libre Office, because it's open source and thereby free of charge, and it is in active development.

I found a video on youtube that described how Apache pulled updates to AOO, but when scrutinized - it turned out that the updates was only minor corrections of semantics, and therefore no actual develoopment was taking place. I don't have a url right now, but should be able to locate by searching.

 

[ReveurGAM]

Yes that is a matter of personal preferences.

Personally, I'd prefer Libre Office, because it's open source and thereby free of charge, and it is in active development.

I found a video on youtube that described how Apache pulled updates to AOO, but when scrutinized - it turned out that the updates was only minor corrections of semantics, and therefore no actual develoopment was taking place. I don't have a url right now, but should be able to locate by searching.

I do a lot of my data recording on an old laptop and I feel more secure knowing that I can store a local copy on it while also having it online, accessible anywhere, in case the local copy is corrupted or the laptop dies. Otherwise, I'd use LO.

 

[Grobe]

I do a lot of my data recording on an old laptop and I feel more secure knowing that I can store a local copy on it while also having it online, accessible anywhere, in case the local copy is corrupted or the laptop dies. Otherwise, I'd use LO.

I've manage my own backup in a little different manner. You see, I use Linux as my OS at home, and while learning how to use Linux I found that it have some capabilities that Windows doesn't have (as far I can tell).

I don't store my files online (trust issues) but have a usb stick that I use for regular backup. My solution is to use a command line tool called rsync that - together with the regular shell (ie. command line environment - in lack of better term) to run a backup that also does versioning (i.e. backup copy is made for every file in target directory that otherwise would be deleted or overwritten by the backup) that in my opinion is the best choice for preventing files being unrecoverable if being overwritten by a corrupted version.

The command I use looks like this (can be used inside a script as well):

rsync -bm0rtv --delete-after --backup-dir='/backup_dir/'$(date +"%Y%m%d_%H%M") --log-file='/backup_dir/logfile.log' '/source_dir/' '/target_dir/'