Excel 2004: Fails to remember document window position on secondary monitor
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshSeptember 29th, 2004 • 5:59 am
This one is another one of Office’s numerous small but annoying bugs…
I often move my spreadsheet document windows to my secondary monitor so that I can view them while editing a document in another application.
Unfortunately, whenever I do that, after I close the document, Excel fails to remember that the document window was on the secondary monitor, and the next time I open the document, Excel positions the document window on the main monitor instead.
To make matters worse, Excel does actually remember the vertical position of the window (i.e. relative to the top of the screen). Since Excel’s toolbars are on my main monitor, there is nothing at the top of the screen on my secondary monitor, so I tend to position my spreadsheet windows fairly close to the top of the screen. So what happens when I close the document and reopen it in Excel? Excel positions the document window very close to the top of the main monitor’s screen, with the consequence that the document window’s title bar ends up behind Excel’s toolbars!
Good grief. Talk about sloppy programming. Of course, it’s one that only affects people who have the luxury of using two monitors. But, with all professional Mac models coming with video cards with two monitor plugs these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few people out there with dual monitors.
September 29th, 2004 at Sep 29, 04 | 6:51 am
>Of course, it’s one that only affects people who have the luxury of
>using two monitors.
Pierre, don’t forget the scores of people who use monitor spanning between their laptop and an external screen.
September 30th, 2004 at Sep 30, 04 | 4:14 am
Paul: You’re correct — although if these people use video mirroring they probably won’t see the problem.
Arnaud: Weird. Very weird :).
September 29th, 2004 at Sep 29, 04 | 4:59 pm
Another funny bug in Excel: create a new file in Excel (Excel 2000/Win) and call the first cell ID (capital letters). save it as whatever.csv.
Close it, and reopen the file, Excel will crash :)
(I have no idea if the bug is known, but I found it out by myself and pulled out pretty much all my hear about it, nor if it will “work” on other versions or platforms but I repeated it on several Win 2000/Excel 2000 computers).
September 30th, 2004 at Sep 30, 04 | 10:40 pm
Interesting! Maybe that’s why Excel 2004 behaves this way now… Maybe it’s Microsoft’s way of “fixing” the problem you described! I wouldn’t be surprised…
September 30th, 2004 at Sep 30, 04 | 3:33 pm
I’m not sure what is the case in Excel 2004, but at least in Excel v. X I had a problem where Excel actually ‘remembered’ the window position on secondary monitor ‘too well’. If I had placed an Excel window on the secondary monitor and saved the document, and had then sent it to a colleague without a secondary monitor, I would soon get a call or a message saying that he or she couldn’t open the document I had sent.
Examining the problem further, I found out that they actually had been able to open the document because it was visible in the Window menu, but they couldn’t see or access it; I guess the window was still positioned as if there was a secondary monitor present. I found out that the only way to get the window off from this ‘virtual screen’ was to use the ‘Zoom Window’ command.
After these experiences I made a habit of not using the secondary monitor with Excel documents I was going to share with somebody. Of course there is a program that is even worse in this respect: Outlook 2001 in Classic mode, but that’s another story…