What is this icon?

Factual Questions
1

I’m working on troubleshooting a weird problem for one of my users. It would take too long to explain in detail, but here’s the upshot:

We’ve got a web application that’s supposed to be able to export a dataset to Excel. It works for everybody except this one guy. Instead of exporting the dataset, when Excel pops up, the only thing in the spreadsheet is this icon in the top left cell.

The export done uses ActiveX to, effectively, (1) take the dataset, (2) put it into the clipboard, (3) launch Excel, and (4) say “paste.” As I said, it works just fine for every other user; it’s just this one computer that’s misbehaving. We suspect that something is conflicting with ActiveX, and causing the copy-and-paste to fail, putting that icon into the clipboard instead of the dataset.

Thing is, we have no idea what that icon represents or where it’s coming from. If we could identify it, we’d go a long way toward resolving the problem. Hence, this thread.

Here is a larger version of the icon. The tiny version above resembles a calculator, but enlarged it looks more like some sort of wireless device.

Anybody have a clue what this is?
(Please hold your derision on ActiveX and Internet Explorer, or Microsoft technology in general. It’s our corporate standard and I can’t do anything about it.)

2

:smack:

That would be “export code.” Duhhrrr.

3

I can’t solve the problem, but in case the experts can’t get here before 5:00 and you need an immediate guess, my first thought when I saw the icon was that it was indicating either text messaging or some other attempt to reach a cell phone.

Any chance you’re including a phone in the connection (dial-up or whatever) and the guy accidentally provided his cell phone number?

4

Nope, we’re on a LAN.

I had the same thought, that it looks like a cell phone or other wireless device. I just don’t know which device. I’m hoping somebody will look at it and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a Blackberry Warblewhatsit. Got one meself,” or some such.

5

Here’s a shot in the dark. Can you right-click on it and select Properties from the context menu? Any menu at all?

6

Not a bad idea, but the only thing it reveals is image information: it’s a gif, it’s 16 pixels by 16 pixels, that sort of thing.

7

Not a solution, but another troubleshooting step to try:

after the icon appears in Excel, what happens if you immediately bring up (say) Word, and “Paste”?

If something different happens, it points to an Excel issue.

8

Monday morning bump, hoping to get lucky. (Baby needs a new pair of shoes.)

DarrenS: I’ve already confirmed it’s in the clipboard. I can go to any other application, hit paste, and get the same icon. The problem clearly is not in Excel; somehow the web page is failing to copy the dataset, or after it’s copying the dataset it’s re-copying something else and wiping out the previous work.

Either way, identifying the icon will tell us at least what the web page is using as its copy source.

9

Skipping whether the ActiveX component is the culprit, I was wondering about some alternate ways of acquiring the data:

Instead of “Paste” try “Paste Special…” The default is “All”. Try “Value” instead to limit the amount of information pasted.

You might also try “Data>Get External Data>Import Text File…” or “File>Open…” with a Comma-Separated-Value file.

A final point, with the information pasted, might be to try “Edit>Object”, choose Convert, and clear the “Display as icon” check box.