Coworker has been trying to work from home, so I can’t see what she’s seeing; but apparently the menu in Excel – the one that says File Edit View Insert Format etc. is missing.
She’s connected to her work computer via Remote Desktop Connection, so she should be seeing Excel the same as it is on her work computer. She says everything looks different.
ISTR that someone ‘lost’ the Excel menu I mentioned, but I can’t find that thread. Does someone know how to restore the menu?
Coupla maybes:
Right click on the top bar (where that menu ought to be) and see if it gives an option for the Tool Bar?
Or (and I have no idea why this works for me): hit the “Maximize” and “Restore Down” buttons in the top right corner.
Or do the old tech support thing and tell her to reboot the computer. 
I tried it on my computer (I’m in Seattle today). I right-clicked where the menues should be. This gave me a long-ish drop-down menu. At the bottom is said ‘Customize’. Clicked that. There came up a window with three tabs: Toolbars, Commands, Options. The last item in Toolbars is ‘Worksheet Menu Bar’.
I unchecked that, and my menus went away. When I closed the dialog box, they came back.
So I called her at home and had her connect to her work computer again. Apparently, she has a different version of Excel than I do. When she right clicks, ‘nothing happens’. In the upper-left corner of my Excel window there is a little green Excel ‘X’ icon and ‘Microsoft Excel - Book1’. On hers, there is a ‘Windows four-[something]’ icon. When she clicks on that, it gives her the option to ‘Save as’ whatever she’s working on. But she can’t find the Sort menu or any of the other things she’s used to.
What I don’t understand is this: If she is connecting to her office computer via Remote Desktop Connection, her RDC window should be showing her what’s on the desktop of her office computer. This is how it is for me, when I’m at home on my Mac – I see my office PC desktop in the RDC window. So why would the version of Excel she is (alledgedly) using at home via RDC not the version that she says she’s been using on her computer?
It’s Friday, and I want to go home. But I have to finish this file I’m working on first. I’ll just let her ask the IT guy when he comes in on Thursday. If you’d still like to post responses, please do. I might be able to use them for future reference.
Thanks.
Sounds like she’s got Excel 2007. In the whole Office 2007 suite the layout has changed, and Excel (I just fired up a test copy) has a big icon called the Office Button (kind of like the “Start” icon) which when you click on it gives access to common commands (Open, Save, Save As, etc).
There’s also an “Excel Options” button under the Office Button and that gets you into the normal set of customization screens including fiddling with menus and whatnot. You may have to get hands on with this as opposed to trying to walk her through it if she’s unfamiliar with it and you haven’t used it yourself. I didn’t see anything to hide the normal menus (which are more like renamed tabs across the top then traditional menus) but that’s just 5 seconds of looking.
Based on the thread she is definitely seeing Excel 2007. That version shows a Microsoft Office logo inside a big circle in the upper left-hand corner, which will vomit up a menu if you click on it. The choices in that menu include many of the ones seen under the old “File” submenu.
If you are expecting 2003 and have never seen 2007, seeing 2007 will be a bizarre experience. The menu structure works completely differently. However, there is still a top-level menu so she ought to be seeing something like Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, etc. [Here’s a screenshot](http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/gallery/imageviewer.mspx?webURL=%2Fpresspass%2Fpresskits%2F2007office%2Fimages%2Fimage025_low.jpg&printURL=&caption=Data+management+in+Microsoft+Office+Excel+2007&JPGSize=(34 KB)&TiffSize=).
I am not familiar with Remote Desktop Connection but I wonder if she is connecting to applications installed on a company server rather than her own work computer. There is no way that she uses Excel 2003 at her desk but gets Excel 2007 by remotely accessing the same computer (well, it is possible to have both installed at the same time but I would imagine she would know it if she had both). She might be able to get visibility to her data on her own machine, but running applications on some common server. I am unsure about that but I have used various ways of remote access and that’s one possibility.
She seems to have a little trouble with the concept that there are different places to save things on a computer. For example, I save files I’m working on to my personal folder so that I don’t clobber anything in the shared folder. The programs I write read and write to a folder within my personal folder. This totally confused her. So even if she does have 2007 on her computer, she wouldn’t know it. (Actually, I’d like to have 2007. It would make my life much easier being able to work with whole files.)
Having 2007 when she uses RDC confuses me. When I log on from my Mac, I see my desktop (except for the wallpaper). AFAIK we don’t even have 2007 in the office. I have a hunch that somehow she has it on her home computer and is mistakenly running it locally instead of 2003 remotely. But she says that she lost the disc she used to install Office on her old computer and so didn’t install it on her new one. Maybe it came pre-loaded and she doesn’t know it.
