Corrupted Excel files

Hi all,

 I've currently got a problem with the Excel 2007. i'll try to describe the problems as i found them.

Finance have 2 seperate instances of Excel open, they copy from one xlsx spreadsheet to another xlsx spreadsheet (seperate instances)
the first time they copy somehting it works fine
the second time they copy somehting it will coppy the cell structure, but the content will be empty

from this i thought it might have been a clipboard error, but the clipboard works perfectly well in most cases.

I asked around the office if this happened to anyone else, and it hasen't so i tried looking at why...
We've recently updated from office 2003 to office 2007 and finannce are one of the few sections that have updated their spreadhseets to Excel 2007, this isn't unique but they are the only ones that are copying from a converted excel document into another converted excel document.

After the user playign around for a bit he found out that it took maybe 20 copy / pastes between the 2 instances of Excel before one of them would corrupt.
When it corrupts it comes up with this message

Excel found unreadable content in 'MyExcelDocument.xlsx', Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook?
If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.

Clicking no will stop everything, clicking Yes will bring up a further error message box with

Repais to ''MyExcelDocument.xlsx'

 Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable contnet.

Removed records: Style from /xl/styles.xml part (Styles)
Removed Records: Format from /xl/styles.xml part (Styles)

and as you can guess from the error message the spreadsheet is stripped of all the formatting finance have done on the spreadsheet, this is quit unacceptable for them as the formatting means as much as the data inside of it does... eg red is high priority, green is low priority ect.

I've foudn a work around by stretching a single instance of Excel between the 2 monitors and have the 2 documents open in one instance, but the ribbon bar stretches and goes between the 2 screens making ti quite difficult to use.

They have now gone back to using Excel format of 2003 that still works perfectly well even though this is now against company policy.

Can anybody suggest to me a way to fix this problem?

Thanks in advanced

Dave Henstock

Dave

My suggestions here are not the best I'm afraid. Moving from compatibility mode (xls to xlsx) Excel tries to approximate stuff that has changed to render it as near as possible. Colours, formatting, styles is one area where much work has gone on and I for one have had to rebuild models to make them work well in Excel 2007.

Whilst I agree this is not acceptable, in my case it made for much better models with faster load and open speed and most of all, conditional formatting using the new iconography, so overall it was worth it.

If I can also say that Excel was very susceptible to crashing with style and format related issues before and you NEVER got the corrupted workbook back, so it is a small mercy.

I would bite the bullet and build some of these as native xlsx files and take the benefits.

Can't offer much more than sympathy