Re: personal.xls "already open"

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: Michael Fisher (msfisher_at_erols.com)
Date: 08/11/04 

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 22:43:57 GMT

Thanks for the response; I haven't had any toolbar problems in a while,
either, so this one really caught me off guard. I must not have explained
things well, because you missed the point. Still, I got some ideas from
your websites. First off, I KNOW I only have one instance of Excel
running, so pretty much all of your reply didn't help. Personal.xls was
NOT locked for editing -- I'd been editing it when the problem occurred.
The error seems to be one you cover on your site -- the appearance, upon
clicking on a custom button, of an error dialog informing me that a file
named personal.xls is already open and I can't have two files with the
same name open.

Thanks to your site and some other newsgroup postings, I found that the
custom toolbar button is pointing to a nonexistent file (named, of course,
personal.xls). It appears that when I assign a macro to the button, it is
being pointed to the default file directory. Changing the directory
didn't help -- it just changed the pointer. I tried your repair macros
with, well, mixed success. I managed to change the path, but it gets
confused between the the file that started with Excel and the SAME file
it's trying to re-open with the button -- that is,
C:\--\XLSTART\personal.xls loads at startup, but the button tries to open
it again. The key was that the macro worked fine from menu or from the
VBE. Putting personal.xls in the Documents & Setting subfolder didn't
help, either.

So now, the problem seems to be how to convince Excel XP/SP3 to NOT grab
the default file path as the path to the personal.xls. Alternatively, I
need to convince Excel to recognize personal.xls in either of the XLSTART
directories correctly. In the interim, I stuck personal.xls in the default
directory so at least the buttons work. I may have to assign a
certificate to it to kill the Disable/Enable dialog.

Any other ideas?

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 22:48:36 -0400, David McRitchie <dmcritchie@msn.com>
wrote:

> Hi Michael,
> It means that you are opening Excel twice. Actual the
> message I get is -- but I think it amounts to the same thing.
>
> File in Use
> PERSONAL.XLS is locked for editing
> by 'username....'.
> Click 'Notify' to open a read-only copy of the document and
> receive notification when the document is no longer in use.
> [Read Only] [Notify] [Cancel] appear on right side
>
> Your toolbars may be at risk, if you are not careful
> and they are different on the two Excel windows.
>
> Open additional workbooks from within Excel (file, open)
>
> I haven't had a problem with toolbars in long time, but I
> am careful to watch out for it.
>
> If you see your toolbars on one of them but not on the other
> close the Excel without your customized toolbars, then
> close the one with your customized toolbars. If you
> closed the wrong one, but did not close Excel yet you can
> restore your toolbars by using a search on *.xlb and
> opening that file with Excel open. If you closed out of
> Excel it is too late because the toolbars file gets save
> every time that Excel closes.
>

> "Michael Fisher" <msfisher@erols.com> wrote in message
> news:opscjlu9pu1mc1vh@news.optonline.net...
>> I've seen this topic before, and tried to implement the ideas people
>> have
>> suggested. The situation is that I have Excel 2003 (XP) on Windows
>> 2000.
>> I have a set of macros in personal.xls, most of which have been tied to
>> toolbar buttons. I just reworked two of them down into one new macro.
>> While writing the macros, I attached the "key" one to a button. It
>> worked
>> just fine. When I finished the work, I deleted the new button and
>> reassigned an old button to the new macro. Suddenly I'm getting the
>> "already open" error. I have deleted ALL file and shortcut references
>> to
>> personal.xls from my C: drive. I have several copies of old
>> personal.xls's saved under different names on a separate network drive.
>> What's weird is that the macro runs fine if I select it from the
>> Tools/Macro/Run menu or if I start it from the VBA editor. Initially,
>> other old custom buttons worked fine. I've tried changing the filename,
>> moving it, recopying it to each of the XLSTART directories (including
>> recording a short macro in it after "reactivating" it), hard and cold
>> reboots along the way, running excel /regserver -- in fact, pretty much
>> everything I could find anyone posting as a solution. NO HELP. I even
>> managed to kill the other custom buttons. I've even tried copying the
>> .xlb the same way.
>>
>> So, does anyone out there have any further ideas?
>>
>> --
>> Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
>
> 

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