Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.
AIA

Microsoft fixes Excel name range bug

by
10th Jul 2009
Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.

An 'an obscure but very annoying' bug in Excel 2007 that occasionally caused range names to disappear when workbooks were saved has been corrected by a Microsoft hotfix. John Stokdyk reports.

Range names allow you to apply a name to an individual cell, group of cells, formula or constant in Excel so that when you want to refer to the information you can simply type in or choose a range from a pull down menu at the top of the worksheet.

As well as making it much easier to create reference formulae, the logic of arguments containing descriptive names is much more intelligible.

But in recent months Excel experts including Smurf on Spreadsheets, Patrick O’Beirne and Jan Karel Pieterse have reported problems with disappearing range names in the latest version of Excel.

In a post on the Daily dose of Excel blog this month, Pieterse reported that Microsoft had quietly released a hotfix to address the problem, which had affected several followers of the blog.

To work, the 18.8MB hotfix requires the user to be running the Service Pack 2 version of Excel 2007; further information about it is available from the Microsoft Help and Support website.

Doug Jenkins added that as well as the range name problem, the hotfix addresses performance problems that crop up when you write to a spreadsheet range from VBA. For a routine that wrote 6,000 values to cells, he found that Excel 2007 took more than 23secs, compared to 3.2secs in Excel 2007.

“I hadn’t had the range name problem, but I’d certainly noticed the slow writing problem, so I was hoping for a significant improvement,” Jenkins said.

Tags:

Replies (0)

Please login or register to join the discussion.

There are currently no replies, be the first to post a reply.