Excel has stopped reading personal.xlsb at startup

[RichardatRedditch]

To my complete surprise, Excel seems to have stopped reading the personal.xlsb at startup, giving me a dreadful " Oh ****" shock when I went to use a macro and found that there were non showing when I clicked on "macros" in the ribbon. I have found that if I manually open C:\Users\Richard\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART\personal.xlsb all the macros are there (thank goodness!)

So far I have looked at file>options>addins>disabled items, and no disabled thing is there.
I have added C:\Users\Richard\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART to the list of trusted locations in file>options>Trust Centre, but to no effect.
I have also tried making a change in one of the macros, and re-saving personal.xlsb in to the XLSTART folder but again to no effect.

Is there anything else I can try, before I am forced to re-install Excel itself (which I don't want to do)?
I am running Excel 2013 on a W7 pro 64bit machine.
Help would be appreciated!
Richard

 

[NotoriousPopol]

Happened to me once at work, only on some machines. Never found a solution! I had to go with add ins to use the macros I wanted.

 

[BGY23]

Hi,
The way I'd tackle this is to copy the personal.xlsb in XLSTART to another folder. Then delete it in start.
Open excel and record a small macro to force xl to create another personal.xlsb file which xl should now see.
Close excel.
Go back to C drive and open/copy the original xlsb and save as over the new one.

Good luck

 

[RichardatRedditch]

Hello BGY23
Many thanks for your prompt reply. Your solution is wonderful, and worked like a charm!
Thanks so very much indeed.
Richard

 

[BGY23]

You're welcome

 

[jimrward]

For what it is worth I have created a small dos script which I have setup to run on Windows shutdown which copies all of my macro files for excel and outlook to another drive for safe backups should the unthinkable happen

 

[RichardatRedditch]

Hello jimrward. Many thanks for taking the time to share your excellent idea. I had taken to copying the personal.xlsb manually, but your idea is a very useful one. I dread the thought that my macros (on which I have lavished a lot of time to get them just perfect - and I don't hold myself out as a good XL macro writer) could suddenly disappear.
Could you give me a few points on how to set up a dos script such as yours - I must confess that I am of an age that remembers using dos command files even before windows, and I thought that .cmd files had gone the way of all flesh with the advent of W7 and on. Apart from "echo" and "rem" I don't remember any of the commands!
Regards Richard

 

[jimrward]

Richard, thanks for the request, replying from iPad as away from home machine at the moment but here are a few pointers for you to research until I get home
First of all do a Google search for group policy editor and batch files, you can then do start run gpedit.msc and have a look around under user configuration, Windows settings, scripts logon/logoff, pick logoff in the right hand box and it will ask you for a batch file name
I keep the batch file on my target drive where I will be copying to so as not to lose that as well, I copy excel, word, and outlook macro files
What version of Windows are you running as you use system variables for file locations or use the fully qualified locations the lines are just a simple copy from C drive to my G drive
I will post more later

 

[RichardatRedditch]

Jim - wow! Thanks for info so far. I am taking a few days over the w/e but will pick up info next week. I am running W7 pro 64 bit and 2013 edition of the MS Office suite.
Regards
Richard

 

[Dr. Demento]

Like Jim, i also backup my Personal.xlsb file but I use a BeforeSave trigger to do so. I'll post it tomorrow if for nothing more than an alternative.

Best wishes