Odd Excel spreadsheet problem -- can no longer format text in a file

I’ve got an Excel spreadsheet I’ve been working with for the past week. It’s only 663 KB, so it’s no monster.

I’ve been able all week to pretty it up and format the text and cells as I’ve needed. Then today, I go to bld some text and the file freezes up on me. I can still operate other programs … but Excel is hung. Task Manager reports that the program is “Not Responding”.

Why would simple text formatting suddenly cause Excel to hang, when it was doing just fine a few hours ago? It acts as though memory is an issue … though surely bolding text should be a negligible drain on the memory.

I can still open the file and work in it … so long as I don’t format any text. So strange.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? What’s the resolution for this issue? FWIW, I’m running Excel 2003 on a Win 2000 system.

Two possible solutions:

  1. Restart your computer.
  2. Create a new blank document and cut and paste everything from your original into it. See if it will let you format text in the new spreadsheet.

Besides trying what Shaggie suggested…

Save the file as .csv format. Close excel, restart excel and open that version. If the problem has gone away, save it back to the .xls version.

Thanks, guys.

I ended up e-mailing the file to myself, and correcting everything on another computer. Then I e-mailed it back to the original computer, and saved it again under a different name in a different location.

Now it’s fine … but there “reasonless” hangups are pretty damn vexing.