Hi Debbie,
I have the same problem and have had it ever since I first installed
Office 2007. A few months ago I scoured the Internet for more
information on this and eventually found an article that said that
there was a particular problem with copying too much data in Excel
2007. I'm not that technical so apologies if this isn't precisely
correct but the inference in the article was that if you copy a lot of
data at some point Excel 2007 will not clear the cache / buffer /
clipboard / temporary file (whatever...) and effectively all that
information (or that process) then becomes a part of the
spreadsheet. If you try to copy it again, you're just filling it up
even more. The article said it was obviously a bug, that it was
unique to Office 2007 and that Microsoft had acknowledged it and would
put out a fix. To date I've seen no such fix and the problems
persists. The article also suggested that a way around it was to
save the file regularly so you would have a "clean" version to go back
to.
I've looked again for the article but, apologies, I can't find it. As
I say, it was a few months ago but I do find it a bit curious that
there is no mention of it elsewhere. What I can find, however, are
many, many messages very similar to yours.
It's very easy to replicate this bug. Create a spreadsheet, fill up a
page with data, equations and formatting (the more you format the
sheet, the quicker the bug will appear) and then start copying rows
and columns from that page in bulk across a number of new pages in the
spreadsheet. At some point the copying process will inevitably grind
to a halt - and there's your bug. What's worrying is that it seems
that if you copy data from one spreadsheet that has the bug, to
another that hasn't - the one that you've copied it to will also have
the bug. In that respect it really is rather like a virus.
One more curious element. If I do this enough, Excel fails
completely, goes transparent, hunts for solutions before it shuts down
and restarts itself. I then get a splendid screen saying that a
solution is available as part of the Windows / Office update.
Great! The problem is that everytime I try to go and get it via
Windows Update, I find it doesn't exist....
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this - any comments???
