Excel 2007 Crashes at Save-As

[rocmills]

I have Office 2007 and use Excel on a daily basis. This version of Excel saves to *.xlsx format by default, which is fine for me but not when I have to email a spreadsheet to someone using an older version of Excel.

The problem is that every time I try to Save-As, the computer instantly reboots. Whether I use the mouse to pull up the drop-down menu, or I use the keyboard shortcut ALT-F-A, as soon as I get to the A part, the machine reboots. Each and every time, without fail. This does not occur in any other Office or Microsoft program, only Excel.

My default drive is local, my mapped drives are good. I ran the Microsoft Office Diagnostics and it did not find anything wrong. I am using an XP Pro (SP3) machine with 2 gig of RAM, Pentium 4 CPU at 2.80 GHz.

Our IT guy pointed me to a Microsoft KB article (support.microsoft.com/kb/271513), but none of the conditions in that article apply to my situation.

It's a real pain in the backside to have to email a file to a co-worker in the office and ask them to convert it for me before I can email it to someone in a different office... especially as I often forget and try to save-as and find myself suddenly starting at a blank screen. These unwanted reboots are wreaking havoc with my Outlook database and my QuickBooks database.

Sure hope someone here has some ideas! Thanks and I hope you all have a great day!

--Roc

--Roc
"Whatever one man can dream, another can accomplish" - Jules Verne

 

[kjv1611]

Well, to me, it kinda sounds like a possible RAM issue. Perhaps that one function is hitting one small bad spot in one of your RAM modules every time. I thought that Vista was programmed so that apps wouldn't consistently use the same memory addresses, but this sounds suspect.

If you can do it, power off the computer, open the case, and pull 1 of the 2 or more sticks of memory out. It'd be best to leave the one in the "first" RAM stick location initially.

Once you've removed a piece of ram, boot up the system, try the same action. Same issue, swap out what piece of RAM is removed.... do this until the problem goes away or until you have tried all possible combinations. If a RAM stick is bad, that should be a simple fix from your IT dept....

Of course, if you have an IT dept, then you'd probably have to let them do this... So, just ask them to try swapping out RAM modules... just pull one out at a time as stated above, and boot into Windows after each try, and see if you ge the same issue.

If that's not it, I suppose my next guess would be some off the wall registry issue, or MAYBE a hard drive issue that the Office repair engine doesn't pick up... well that'd be the same for RAM. I've seen many failed hard drives and/or memory modules over the past couple years where no test I'd run would show any errors, but I just knew it was the issue by basic trial and error.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[rocmills]

Thanks, Kjv, I'll give that a try. No need to bother the IT guy with it (half the time, he comes to me when he has a problem. I'm technically the bookkeeper, but I have more experience with building and fixing computers than our IT guy does, he's more the software fellow while I am trying not to let the boss know how much I know about computers... shhh).

I have to go out for lunch today, and I don't work Fridays, but I will try swapping out the RAM during lunch on Monday. Will also try un-mapping my network drives and see if that makes any difference (even though they are not default drives).

--Roc

 

[kjv1611]

You know, I didn't think of the mapped network drives. That very well could be an issue.

I take care of the PCs at our church - an office PC, and our media PC. I had set up network drives between the two to have an easy way to swap files, backup between the two, etc.

Well, I never really thought much of it, but finally got to looking around and asking around on here about slowness of attempting to save a Word Doc (I think we were still using Word 2003 on the machine at the time). Well, based on some recommendations in here, I zapped the network drive, b/c it was hardly used - even though it wasn't a default save-in location as you say, and it fixed my issues there.

Our issue wasn't a crashing PC, but it did just freeze the whole system up for a couple seconds... so, in your case, if there happens to be a weak piece of a component anywhere, that freeze-up may just be enough to take the whole thing down..

I'd give that one a shot for sure as well!

Be sure to let us know once you do get to try these fixes.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[doubeld]

Hey rocmills, I have the same problem here in a slightly different environment. Did you ever find a solution to this problem?

The only difference is that my users are running on a Terminal Server and when they click the drop down menu in any Office 2007 Word or Excel "Save As" dialog box, the session terminates immediately (which would be similar to your reboot) and they have to log back in and reopen their applications.

The Operating System is Windows Server 2003 R2 running on a VMWare ESX 4.0 host.

 

[xlhelp]

Crashes usually happen during the re-calculate cycle. Excel re-calculates on Save if the calc mode is set to automatic. To see if that's the problem switch to manual calculation and try to save.

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