Control renamed after saving xl2000 file from xl2007

[milesUK]

I’m now a 2 day veteran of Office 2007! But something very strange is happening when an Excel 2000 file, opened in Excel 2007 is Saved As.. either a Macro Enabled Workbook or as a Binary Workbook.

On opening one of my Excel 2000 workbooks I am presented with a warning dialogue; “This application is about to initialize ActiveX controls that might be unsafe. If you trust the source of this file, select OK and the controls will be initialized using your current workspace settings." <OK> <Cancel>”

On selecting <OK> the file opens and shows “Compatibility Mode” in the title bar. Control buttons in the sheets have their correct, original names that I defined.
However, Save the file As.. a Macro Enabled Workbook (control names OK at this stage), close and reopen the file and command buttons in the sheets are being renamed back to a standard form (e.g. a button I’ve Named cmd_Run is being renamed as CommandButton1 when saved in an Excel2007 format) and consequently the code is rendered useless. It was created so long ago that I don’t know if it was originally CommandButton1 when placed down on the sheet!

Same occurs if I save As.. Binary Workbook.

The original 2000 workbook is protected so I retested the whole process with a newly created and unprotected Excel2000 workbook and all seems fine:

Created a new wb in Excel 2000.
Added 3 ActiveX Command Buttons and renamed them (cmd_OK, cmd_Cancel & cmd_Button3 ).
Saved and Closed the wb.

Opened the wb in Excel 2007.
No message about potentially unsafe ActiveX controls!
Command Button names OK.
Saved As.. Macro-Enabled Workbook.
Command Button names still OK.
Closed and reopened.
Command Button names still OK.

Opened the Exel2000 wb in Excel 2007.
Command Button names OK.
Saved As.. Binary Workbook.
Command Button names still OK.
Closed and reopened.
Command Button names still OK.

Has anyone else experienced this, or similar behaviour.

Miles

 

[baitmaster]

not seen this particular problem, but not entirely surprised...

I've not yet seen any particular benefit to saving as .xlsm or other new formats, so I keep saving as .xls files. I've found this is easier for backwards compatibility, and seems to eradicate a number of these types of problem

When creating new files in xl07 and then saving them as .xls you do often get annoying messages telling you you've used a format that won't work in 03, so the font will be changed to the nearest compatible, or some similar nearly irrelevant comment... but at least the files generally work the same...

hope this helps

 

[TheAverageBear]

I just ran into this situation for the first time today.

I tried saving as XLSM, and XLSB, and we even have a 3rd party tool that converts files from older versions to Office 2007. In all cases, the button was renamed to CommandButton1.

When I at the button properties, it has the new name (cmdSplit). But, when I look at the Name Box on the Formula Bar, it shows "CommandButton1", not the same name as in the properties. If I try to change the name in the Properties to the same value (in this case "cmdSplit"), it gives me a Visual Basic error message "Ambiguous name detected". If I rename the button to something different (such as adding a '1' to the end) then rename it back, then the Name field changes to match the Properties name.

I don't think there is any easy way to fix this, besides going into Design Mode and clicking on your buttons to see if the Name Box matches the Name Property before you convert.

 

[milesUK]

baitmaster - fair comment about backwards compatibility but as this particular file is an internal workbook for retrieving data from OSI PI we are 'embracing' the latest file formats; the binary is consistently producing files around 30% the size of xl2000. That's not to say that we won't maintain xl97-03 in the future on some files

TheAverageBear - nice to see we are not alone. The only thing I can think of is the password protection that was applied to one of the sheets in my workbook. This was created by a third party and we are stuck with it. It may be possible that this protection of (part of) the workbook is preventing xl from fully converting to the new file format.