Microsoft Excel Error

What Is A Microsoft Excel Error?

After the ubiquitous Word, Excel is probably the program of the Microsoft Office suite that the majority of users are most familiar with.

Excel is the spreadsheet application that is one key element of the Office program suite and there are ‘versions’ available for both a Windows driven PC and also for the Mac OS that is used on Apple Mac computers.

For the purposes of this article, however, I am going to focus my attentions on the former rather than the latter.

Given the dominance of the Office suite in the business software market sector, it follows that Excel should also be the overwhelmingly dominant spreadsheet program in use across the world.

Beyond the popularity of Office, there are two other very straightforward reasons for this dominance.

Firstly, Excel is a remarkably easy program to use even for the most basic beginning computer user. Secondly, almost in spite of its simplicity, Excel is an extremely functional business tool with both outstanding graphing tools and relatively advanced calculation functions, both of which genuinely belie the apparent basic nature of the program itself.

Unfortunately, this very simplicity is one of the reasons that Excel sometimes has error problems.

Inexperienced or less than fully competent users are one of the most widespread causes of many Excel errors, simply because the levels of functionality that the program offers also provides far more opportunities to make the mistakes that have an adverse effect on the underlying program.

That being said, however, not every Microsoft Excel error message indicates a problem that has been generated by an incompetent user!

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Commonly Seen Microsoft Excel Errors

The first thing to say is that like the other ‘universal’ program in the Microsoft Office suite (Word), Excel has a tendency to report or indicate many errors and problems that do not, in fact, exist.

Most commonly, for example, an error message that indicates that there is not enough memory or disk space to open the program is more than likely to be a false positive reading.

Rather than being factually true, what this is far more likely to be telling you is that there is another program that you have open and running on your machine that is eating up the memory and processing capabilities that Excel needs in order to open and then run correctly.

So, as a first step, open and check your Windows Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del) to establish exactly how much of the CPU is currently in use. If it is a high percentage, then turn off any other programs that are running that you are not actually using.

This can significantly reduce the percentage of resources that your PC is using, and you may very well find that your Excel problem has almost miraculously disappeared!

If this is not successful, or does not seem to be the problem, then you may very well be experiencing a software conflict situation. Have you recently installed any new software, particularly programs produced by independent third party software producers?

If so, this may be the cause of the problem. For some reason, this program and its underlying applications and DLL files are having a deleterious effect on Excel and stopping it running correctly.

The third possibility is that some of Excels own application and DLL files (which are the underlying program components that make it work in the first place) have somehow become damaged, corrupted or in the most extreme example, removed completely.

Uninstalling programs, even those that apparently have no connection whatsoever with Excel, can be the root cause of this problem.

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Dealing With Microsoft Excel Errors

As suggested above, the first thing that you should do is to establish whether it is merely a question of another program stealing Excels memory and processing requirements.

The next remedial step that you can take is review what actions you have recently taken that could have caused any problems that Excel is genuinely suffering from.

Have you installed new software, or added additional hardware devices to your set-up? If so, is it possible that you can turn them off completely to see if that makes a difference?

For example, it is usually possible it switch off programs or temporarily disable hardware devices. Try it to see what difference that makes, if any.

Failing any of these steps being effective, you may have an application or DLL that is conflicting with Excel. Or, the files that underlie the program itself could be damaged or corrupted.

You need to scan your registry to see if this is the case.

Especially if you have not run such a scan before, or not in the recent past, this will inevitably turn up hundreds of minor registry defects as well as possibly finding the major errors that are causing your problems.

If you already have the appropriate software to do this job, run it now to see what is going on. If not, then take advantage of a free scan from a market leader like SpeedyPC, so that you can delve into the Excel problem in far greater depth and quickly establish what is causing you difficulties.

Once this is established, then it becomes a relatively straightforward matter to know what to do to repair it.