Scrambled Spreadsheet Images

[spats]

Has anyone ever run across the problem where visually one spreadsheet image is superimposed (partial image) over another spreadsheet in the same workbook? It goes away when you scroll the partial image off the screen, and then scroll back again. Seems like it's maybe a refresh problem.

 

[IRstuff]

Sounds like a graphics card problem

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[IDS]

Is this a recent thing?

See this blog post about the effects of a recent update:

http://smurfonspreadsheets.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/excel-screen-flicker/

(I haven't seen this behaviour myself)

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[GregLocock]

was the image source a png file?

Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[Denial]

I recently started experiencing exactly the problem described by Spats and by the web site referenced by Doug Jenkins. And, with the benefit of the hindsight provided by this thread, I can nail its commencement to the forced updating imposed by my employer a few days ago. (I am using Excel 2003.)

Call me a naive optimist, but I'd like to think that December's corporate updates will fix it.

 

[Denial]

Forgot to mention. The spreadsheets I have been working on since this nice "feature" arrived are all quite large, and slow to recalculate. As a result, I have Recalculation set to Manual. The problem seems to appear mainly, perhaps even only, when I do a Recalc. (I am not at work now and so cannot run any tests.)

 

[spats]

Thanks IDS I followed the link, removed the update and it worked fine!

 

[ahramos]

I'm in the same boat with Denial. My company installed a coporate update which included Microsoft's recent update. I cannot simply remove the update like Spats. I've followed some of the threads indicated in IDS's link and have been painfully trying to implement some workarounds within VB. Though I've been successful on one page, the rest of spreadsheet is a complete nuisance. Since I'm not a programmer, and I didn't create this particular spreadsheet, it's been a nightmare.

 

[Denial]

An update. My employer's IT support chappie came to my desk and uninstalled the recent updates. My problem went away. He then re-installed them, and the problem reappeared. Unfortunately he tells me he cannot leave the patches uninstalled because Corporate HQ (on another continent, coincidentally Bill Gates's continent) will not allow this: something about "security".

He also told me that he had tried to reproduce my problem on several other, supposedly identical, computers. The problem did NOT occur on those other computers. So his conclusion is the the problem is caused by some sort of interaction between the latest patches and some aspect of the way I am running my computer.

If it wasn't for Eng-Tips alerting me to this being experienced by people other than me, I would have wasted the last fortnight trying to work out which of the last minor changes I made to the spreadsheet had been the cause of the problem.

In some recent testing, I did discover two more things.
(1) If I disable macros when opening the troublesome spreadsheet, the problem does not arise.
(2) My spreadsheet, being intended to be run by the target readership of the "for Dummies" series of books, usually runs with protection set ON for all worksheets and for the workbook as a whole, a state that is partially enforced by activating this protection through the Workbook_Open event handler. In this state the problem does NOT happen. It requires that I set the protections to OFF (my usual state when maintaining the spreadsheet) for the problem to raise its ugly head.

And I have found that the quickest way to get the screen showing the correct way is to activate another sheet then go back and activate my sheet of interest immediately afterwards. It is less work than scrolling the screen up then down.

Ahramos. Does what you are experiencing match this?

 

[spats]

Even though I was able to remove the offending Office security update, of course, it comes back again if you don't turn off updates. Unfortunately, my Office updates are somehow linked to Windows updates, and I've yet to find a way to separate them... anybody know how to turn off Office updates and still get Windows updates? Right now I've got all updates turned off.

 

[IRstuff]

There's supposed to be a setting that tells the updater to hide updates that the user has rejected.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[Denial]

A further update.

After a heap of playing around, I have discovered that all the spreadsheets that exhibit the problem use "dynamic named ranges". If I simply (but laboriously) convert these to static named ranges the problem disappears. Of course, the spreadsheet then becomes completely useless, but that is beside the point.

This presence of, and potential removal of, the problem applies whether the dynamic named ranges are constructed using the OFFSET function or the INDEX function.

So, the problem seems to have revealed the following characteristics.
» The spreadsheet must be unprotected.
» The spreadsheet must have macros, with those macros "enabled".
» The spreadsheet must use dynamic named ranges.
» The spreadsheet must have a large amount of data (whatever I might mean by "large").
» Microsoft's latest updates must have been installed on the computer.
» Even if all the above conditions are met, the problem will occur on some computers yet not occur on others that seem to be identically configured.

Does anyone out there have any experience, or is anyone prepared to run some tests, that confirm and/or contradict and/or supplement the above characteristics?

 

[Denial]

A nother further update.

It seems that, in my case at least, the reversal of the single Office update

"Security Update for Excel 2003 (KB973475): EXCEL"

is sufficient to get rid of the screen scrambling behaviour.