Stupid Excel keeps crashing

[Dick Dastardly]

Anyone else had this problem?

I've got quite a large database in Excel (about 1500 rows x 20 colums, including hyperlinks, highlights and other compications) which has now frozen a few times and the only thing I can do is pull the cable out of my laptop and start it up again, losing whatever unsaved work there was.

Just before it dies, the rows start to merge together and the data in some fields turns into nonsense. Is there anyway around this without having to hit the save button after every single input?

[Plotloss]

Sounds like a lack of memory thing to me...

Get your technical department to double the ram in the laptop...

[Podie]

Depending on the version, go to help and click on "detect and repair" - sometimes solves minor bugs... otherwise, get the second level support guys on it...

[.Mark]

There was a spate of this in our company sometime ago, even in the most simple spreadsheets.
Turned out to be some sort of virus causing a problem, sorry I have looked but can't find the name anymore.
Might be worth running a chack though?

[m-five]

We had a similar problem with a much larger Excel file (30,000 rows x 112 columns) and the only solution was to create a new Excel workbook and copy and paste column by column until we found out what column was causing the problem.

We found a illegal (circular) entry in one cell that bombing out when it tried to calculate (40,000 calcs every time you change one cell).

We also tried saving the file as an older Excel version and the opening it again but that didn't help us.

Have you got any formatting in the cells below you working range as this will increase Excel's memory requirements as it makes the calculation area bigger. Select all the rows below your working range and do an [Edit:Clear:All], and then repeat for the unused columns as well.

[Dick Dastardly]

Cheers for the tips guys, I'll run a Virus check now and then get onto the IT chaps about it.

Hopefully this'll be the end of it. Bloody Microsoft