Mark Henri's General Guidelines for What to Check When Excel Problems Arise

August 12, 2002

Mark Henri's general Excel troubleshooting guidelines were nominated as the Hall of Fame.

Mark works for Microsoft as a Tier 1 Excel Support Technician. When you call Microsoft for a $35 support call, you might get to talk to Mark. He has developed a great list of things to check when something is going wrong in Excel.

I can attest that this list has saved me hours of work. When you buy Excel, you get two free support calls, and after that, the team at Microsoft will do a great job for your $35. When you run into something bizarre that can not be solved by the Message Board team, give Microsoft a call at 425-635-7056.

Reprinted with Mark's permission, here is his general checklist when things go wrong in Excel:

Try excel in safe mode (Start|Run 'excel /s' does the problem go away. If so, it's simple configuration files interfering with Excel.
What version/os? I need this just so I know how to ask the customer to do stuff.
Are the menu configuration files corrupt? To find out, search for *.XLB and delete them. Try excel in normal mode. If it works I'll ask if the customer installed Adobe or Palm software which may have corrupted our menus when they tried to put their icon on our toolbar.
Are the toolbar configuration files corrupted? Search for *.pip files for excel and only remove the excel ones. check software again.
Check the add-ins and alternate startup folders for files that may be starting with Excel and blowing it out. Remove them and test.
Check the XLSTART folders and make sure nothings loading that's causing the problem.
Delete the correct registry key for this version of Excel and let the installer re-initialize them. (And I definitely need to make sure the customer is with me on this one for obvious reasons.)
If safe mode didn't correct the problem way back at step 1, I'll need to try it in OS safe mode. This knocks out services and background apps that can crash Excel. We know of many and there are new ones popping up from time to time. This also breaks the network connection which is also the source of all sorts of problems opening files and starting Excel.
If this didn't work, we might try a repair installation of Excel. I'd be starting to make subtle checks for telltale signs of viruses on the customer's system without panicking them. Also, I'd be looking for previous installation remanents that may be messing the current version up.
Next, I'd be looking at video and print drivers. Did the user install a new printer? Those all in one type are constantly causing us grief. Now I've got to do some damage control because often their drivers aren't compatible with XP for example. I might try a different printer driver. (I know this seems weird to some but here's the reason--Excel is actually a raster graphics program as opposed to say Word which uses vector graphics. The printer driver is crucial to the display of the spreadsheet. The video driver can also come into play but not as often.)
At this point, I'm snoozing the customer really well because they are getting pretty frustrated and I've got to keep them on track and working toward the goal. This requires quite a bit of diplomacy on my part and I can say with certainty that we earn our $35 per incident charge (if they've already used up their two free incidents that is). I may also, conference in HP or one of our OS support people for assistance with selective startups or troubles that appear to be OS-related.
OK, so if I still haven't found the solution, I escalate this to a person that will continue to work the case to resolution.

Adapted from this thread on the message board which was adapted from Mark Henri's Website

Mark Henri lives in Spokane Washington and is a technical support specialist for Microsoft. He joined the MrExcel Message Board in August 2002. Mark wins fame, fortune, and a stylish MrExcel Deluxe Can Koozie for being selected as this week's Hall of Fame winner.