Duplicate Sheets in Excel VBA Project

[jc55]

Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing an issue in my Excel workbook where multiple duplicate sheets are appearing in the VBA project explorer. Periodically a new sheet will be created following the naming convention pictured below:

These sheets don’t appear in the main Excel interface, only in the VBA project. I’ve checked for any hidden sheets in the workbook, and they aren’t listed there. There are no macros explicitly creating or duplicating sheets that I’m aware of.

Moreover, these duplicate sheets are not visible when I save the workbook as a zip archive and attempt to remove them manually. It is also not possible to target/remove these sheets using VBA:

What I’m looking for help with:​

1. Identifying the root cause: What could be triggering the creation of these duplicate sheet objects? Could this be a sign of workbook corruption or something else?
2. Removing the duplicate sheets: How can I safely delete these objects from the VBA project explorer without them reappearing?

Thanks in advance!

 

[jkpieterse]

Have you tried to clean the VBA project?
There is a tool that does that, but it only works on 32 bit Office unfortunately:

Excel VBA Code Cleaner Add-in

Alternatively, follow these steps to clean up the VBA project:

1. Open the xlsm file
2. Save-as the file to the xlsx format
3. Close the workbook
4. Open the newly saved xlsx
5. Open the old xlsm
6. Open the VBE
7. Drag each module, userform, class module from the xlsm to the xlsx
8. Open each sheet (the ones that are really there) module, select all code and copy it
9. Open the same sheet module of the xlsx file and paste the code
10. Do the same for the ThisWorkbook module
11. Make sure the same references in the xlsx project are checked as you have checked in the xlsm project
12. Close the xlsm file
13. Save-as the xlsx file to xlsm format (possibly using a new name too)
14. Close the xlsm file and open it again