Excel F8 - Shut Down PC

[Pacman52]

Hi all, I briefly asked about this ages ago just for some general advice but I've now had the time to look for a solution but no luck.

So firstly I'm running on a Windows 11 Home User 64bit edition, with Office 365.

When using a Excel macro enabled workbook (WB) with Modules, Userform's etc as soon as I press F8 to step into some code, my computer immediately shuts down and a few moments later starts backup and takes me back to the same windows / programs that were open before I pressed F8.

My initial thought was it was some 'dodgy' code in my WB, so closed everything down, shut down and restarted my PC and then opened a completely new WB, added a few lines of very basic VBA, saved the WB and reopened it. But again as soon as I pressed F8 the PC shut down and restarted, I then tried on my Laptop again with 365 but Win 10 and it worked fine (both F8 & F11)

Next I removed Office 365 from the PC, shut down, restarted and installed a new version again the same thing happened when pressing F8 in that the PC shut down and restarted again. I also noted that when I pressed F11 to get to VBA, this did nothing, the only way to access VBA was to right click on a worksheet and select view code.

I'm now completely stuck on what could be causing the problem with Excel. All the other 365 apps work with absolutely no issues and even Excel does if I manually access the VBA window.

Just to note, I did recently replace my SSD hard drive to a new bigger one and also upgraded my ram from 32 to 64 but checked with HP tech support before buying that what I was planning to do is supported by my PC model, and I installed a new 'Clean version of Windows 11'. Logic tells me that the Excel problem is not related to the upgrades as literally everything else works perfectly including Excel generally.

Does anyone know of a solution or a known issue that could be causing this and more importantly how to solve it - could it be a keyboard issue perhaps.

Many thanks for any help offered.

Paul

 

[Artik]

I feel for you. Such “non-standard” cases are rare, so it is often difficult to find an answer.
However, the description of the problem points to an incorrect installation of Office. I do not rule out that it is also somehow related to the installation of the operating system, since removing and reinstalling Office did not give anything. For my part, I can only advise reinstalling the system and Office.

Artik

 

[Logit]

My research of the internet shows F8 is utilized during the booting process to open Windows in Safe Mode. None of the websites I researched had any information related to your
issue where pressing F8 after Windows starts.

I would suggest this might be a BIOS issue. You may want to access your BIOS settings and review the settings there. Perhaps (maybe) there is a setting on your computer
that causes your issue.

My $.02 cents.

 

[Pacman52]

My research of the internet shows F8 is utilized during the booting process to open Windows in Safe Mode.

Hi Logit,

So are you saying that it could be a Windows problem as when the PC 're-starts' it's not in safemode it's back to the state it was before pressing F8 (although on the WB the macros are disabled and it needs to be recovered)

 

[Pacman52]

Thanks Artik,
Re-installing Windows is on my 'list' but I'm holding off doing this for now purely on the time it will take to back everything up, sort out Windows and if need be re-install everything again. I know you can re-install it without losing documents and programs though so I would try this option first before a clean install but again I'm hoping I don't have to do this purely because of time.

 

[tonywatsonhelp]

Hi, I just saw this and I had something similar happen to me before but I'm not 100% sure if this is helpful but just in case,
Excel is a wonderful complex woman and like all women won't tell you when you have done something wrong LOL, but I found I had some bad code written in the document, it was the macro a was running but for some reason excel couldn't handle it so just closed down, so I'd suggest you maybe close all other excel and office docs down, remove all macro including in your personal folder, then write a simple macro copy paste type thing and try running this and using the F8 to step through it, it it still crashes, do what we do when a woman is impossible to understand trade it in and get a younger newer one with less baggage! lol but if it does crash, then put each macro back in one at a time and see if you can identify which one is causing the problem.

 

[Pacman52]

My research of the internet shows F8 is utilized during the booting process to open Windows in Safe Mode. None of the websites I researched had any information related to your
issue where pressing F8 after Windows starts.

I would suggest this might be a BIOS issue. You may want to access your BIOS settings and review the settings there. Perhaps (maybe) there is a setting on your computer
that causes your issue.

My $.02 cents.

Sorry Logit I was looking at your reply on my phone whilst away from the pc and it didn’t show the full reply hence my intitial response. I didn’t even think of a possible issue with the bios so will look at that first.

 

[Pacman52]

Hi, I just saw this and I had something similar happen to me before but I'm not 100% sure if this is helpful but just in case,
Excel is a wonderful complex woman and like all women won't tell you when you have done something wrong LOL, but I found I had some bad code written in the document, it was the macro a was running but for some reason excel couldn't handle it so just closed down, so I'd suggest you maybe close all other excel and office docs down, remove all macro including in your personal folder, then write a simple macro copy paste type thing and try running this and using the F8 to step through it, it it still crashes, do what we do when a woman is impossible to understand trade it in and get a younger newer one with less baggage! lol but if it does crash, then put each macro back in one at a time and see if you can identify which one is causing the problem.

Thanks Tony if your saying Excel is women complex or not, I’ll give up now as there is no way I’ll ever be able to understand what’s wrong lol. I don’t think it has anything to do with any Macros to be honest as I tried your suggestion already although I must admit I didn’t check my Personal folder so will have a look at that in a moment.

 

[zero269]

Thanks Tony if your saying Excel is women complex or not, I’ll give up now as there is no way I’ll ever be able to understand what’s wrong lol. I don’t think it has anything to do with any Macros to be honest as I tried your suggestion already although I must admit I didn’t check my Personal folder so will have a look at that in a moment.

If it's a managed work computer, get with your IT staff. Save yourself the headache.

However, if it's your personal computer, at a minumum try the following:
I usually start with Hardware > Drivers > OS > Add-In's (if applicable) > Applications.
However, based on your issue, I'm recommending these first two as they only take a few minutes.

Rule out Macro Shortcut Keys. It doesn't appear that you can assign just the F8 key to a macro, a search on Google thinks to differ...
There's a post on this forum on how to check them all quickly: How do I get a list of the hotkeys I've assigned to Excel VBA macros?

Rule out corrupt printer drivers. Excel and printers appear to have too close of a relationship from my experience. Just stop the print spooler before opeing the workbook to test. Click Start type cmd and then choose run as Administrator. Enter net stop spooler. There's a video here that looks helpful regarding corrupt printer drivers:

Disk Cleanup:
Run Disk Cleanup as an Administrator on your system drive and clean everything up. If you see the Downloads folder listed, you might want to uncheck that one. However, don't confuse that with the Downloaded Program Files; you want that one checked. Restart the computer afterwards.

Hardware Diagnostics:
You might want to rule out storage/system/memory corruption.

Run the System File Checker to check for and attempt a repair of any OS corruption. This one can take a very long time if any corruption is found.

Run Check Disk on your system drive.

You should check your memory. Hopefully you are comfortable with removing the memory modules one at a time and checking them with a Memory Scanner tool, such as the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool.

Rule out a corrupt Office installation. Uninstall the Office suite > restart > reinstall > test your workbook.

Now, with all that said, I decided to do a quick check online and this popped up:

Best regards,

 

[Logit]

zero269​

Excellent information and recommendations. Kudos to you sir !