Excel Crashes When Closing Certain Workbooks

[billtreloar]

When I close certain spreadsheets (while leaving Excel open), Excel immediately crashes. It doesn't crash as I save the file, just as I close the file window within Excel.

Several things complicate this.
1) Office 2010 installed on a brand new computer running Windows 10 64-bit. (Didn;t happen on previous Windows 10 computer)
2) Spreadsheets being sent to me via Dropbox
3) Some or all may have been XLSM which I then converted to XLSX after being warned that when I installed Excel on this machine I neglected somehow to install macro capability.
4) Some or all may have come across in Protected View, requiring me to click on Enable Editing
5) This doesn't affect all Excel files from the person but it doesn't seem to affect files from anyone else who sends me files the same way
6) The person originating the files is using Excel 2013. She reports having to enable editing on any files I send her as well, though I usually send as email attachments rather than through Dropbox.

I have reinstalled Office 2010 and also done a Repair. That didn't help.

I just copied the data range from one of these problem files to a new spreadsheet and laboriously reconstructed a bunch of charts. Despite creating a new spreadsheet, it still crashes Excel when I close the spreadsheet.

Any ideas what's going on? How can I troubleshoot this?

[mikeTRON]

64 bit office seems to be more volatile in my experience.

Have you run WINDOWS UPDATES to check online for any updates? I did that and it solved my issue (even though mine would crash on open not close).


Also you can determine what caused the crash by going to the event logger.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/942910

For me it was typically VBE7.DLL or something like that.

[billtreloar]

Thanks, Mike,

Yes Windows 10 is all up to date. I'm not familiar with the event logger, so didn't do that.

I'll do that the next time this happens.

Now I just need to remember which spreadsheets did this ...

[billtreloar]

Hi, Mike,

Here's what the event logger tells me:
Faulting application name: EXCEL.EXE, version: 14.0.4756.1000, time stamp: 0x4b9c08e8
Faulting module name: oart.dll, version: 14.0.4756.1000, time stamp: 0x4b9c0c53
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001c19ac
Faulting process id: 0x6c58
Faulting application start time: 0x01d1ece4438d2b01
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\oart.dll
Report Id: 58884c63-5988-11e6-af24-54ee759dc897
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

What's to do at this point? Look to download a new copy of oart.dll?

[mikeTRON]

Are you SURE there are no updates when you manually click on SEARCH FOR UPDATES?
My problem was I had a one-off laptop and the IT dept would control the flow of updates to the laptop. Well since we had ONE 64bit laptop and it was likely not that well known, nobody pushed ANY 64bit updates to my laptop.

The event logger has all crashes logged. You can go there now and scroll down until you find a crash (which was a red symbol) and see what caused it, then research that.

All in I don't envy your situation I had to spend four+ hours on the phone with a Microsoft representative to get help when I was experiencing this issue.

[mikeTRON]

I would just start searching on google, "Excel 2010 64 bit crash oart.dll when saving" or when closing or whatever.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...cel+2010+64bit

[billtreloar]

Thanks — tried that. Found a couple of other people with similar problems but no answers.

The problem is in charts. Copying the data to a clean workbook and then laboriously recreating the 9-10 charts sidesteps the problem.

Fortunately this only seems to affect 4-5 worksheets, but it's still a time consuming pain.

[mikeTRON]

Can you create an entirely new workbook and see if THAT crashes?
It might just be a corrupt workbook.

[billtreloar]

Yes! If I create a new workbook and copy the data over, then recreate all the charts, it's fine. If I copy and paste the charts instead of recreating them from scratch, it crashes. By process of elimination I narrowed it down to only one or more of the last three charts (out of 9-10). The first half dozen charts were fine to copy & paste. (But of course I had to redirect where all the data came from after deleting the original worksheet.)

What concerns me is that it's not a single case, but at least three (of about a dozen) that one employee updated and sent to me. On her computer they don't crash — only on my computer. I'm concerned that a trend may be starting ...

[mikeTRON]

I would likely have them provide you with the updated data and you can copy and paste (or VBA) your way to victory. Then you dont have to worry about them corrupting your files.

Super annoying all around though, I know!

[billtreloar]

Sadly, doing what you suggest would take me more time than my employee spends gathering the data. It would be easier, faster, and cheaper for me to do that work myself. :-(

[mikeTRON]

Haha, I know what you mean. I was just offering suggestions to maybe side step the problem.

[newdoverman]

What kinds of charts are in the problem workbooks? Some smooth line Scatter Charts have been reported as causing problems.

[billtreloar]

What kinds of charts are in the problem workbooks? Some smooth line Scatter Charts have been reported as causing problems.

Simple line charts showing one or two data ranges with monthly numbers against monthly X-axis. Couldn't be simpler.

[newdoverman]

You get the updated files from one person...right? Can you get a copy of the files before this person edits them? Perhaps it is something that person's computer is doing that is causing the problem.

[billtreloar]

I can probably recover them from the previous month from my backup. That's a good idea — I should test that. They didn't crash last month.

Oddly, we have equivalent spreadsheets for several clients ... and not all of them (coming from the same employee) exhibit this behavior. That complicates troubleshooting.

[newdoverman]

Here is an article from a subscription at askleo.com that I subscribe to that could be of some help as it touches on file corruption.

https://askleo.com/why_or_how_do_files_become_corrupt/?awt_l=odjU6o&awt_m=3VPcU3YR_.QPzbL

[billtreloar]

Thanks, Newdoverman. I've got both local and online file/folder backups and drive images.

Old backup copies still crash Excel. So I expanded my troubleshooting. The old PC is still available. So I copied the crashing XLSX files to the old computer and opened them there. Office 2010 is still installed there, and apparently reinstalling it on the new PC didn't disable it on the old PC. Both copies are from the same original installation disc.

Bottom line: these files are perfectly fine on my old computer. They do not crash Excel.

Suspecting the problem might be in my new installation of Office 2010 (but before conducting this test) I "repaired" the installation on the new computer about a week ago, but that didn't help. Now that I have these new results from the old computer, I'm in a quandary. Since I ran a "repair" of the installation here, have I ruled out Excel as the culprit? Can it be something else about the configuration of the new computer that disagrees with these files? If that's the case, upgrading Office may not fix things.

Any thoughts?

[billtreloar]

Mike — in light of my latest troubleshooting results where the files copied back to my old computer work fine and don't crash Excel ... do you think I should uninstall Office on the new computer and reinstall it as 32-bit instead?

Before I do that, how can I tell if my old computer has the 32-biit version or the 64-bit version installed? On both versions, it's found in \Program Files (x86)\, not in \Program Files\ — does that indicate anything?

[mikeTRON]

Did the old PC have a 64bit OS or office installation?

[mikeTRON]

This should help you identify which version you have. and/or were running.
https://liberty.service-now.com/kb_v...f1cb6de5727f5a

[newdoverman]

Check the add-ins that are installed on both computers. The first thing that I suspect is that an add-in on the new installation is not working properly. Try starting Excel (on the new installation) in SAFE MODE.
Find the shortcut icon for your Office application.
Press and hold the CTRL key and double-click the application shortcut.
Click Yes when a window appears asking if you want to start the application in Safe Mode.
If this doesn't fix the problem, I would uninstall Office entirely, reboot and then reinstall.
You might want to use Revo Uninstaller to do a thorough uninstall. That of course is up to you.

Good luck.

PS: I use both 32 and 64 bit installations of Excel 2010 and neither has caused a problem.

[billtreloar]

Thanks for this - it made it easy to check. Both computers are running Windows 10 64-bit. The installation of Excel on both computers is the 32-bit version.

[billtreloar]

Thanks — It asked me to confirm I wanted to start in Safe Mode and I said yes. I loaded one of the problem XLSX files and upon closing the file, Excel crashed just as I've been seeing in normal mode.

[newdoverman]

That suggests to me that there is something wrong with the Excel installation. I would uninstall Office and re-install after rebooting. This may not be easily solved as it may involve dll and other files installed with Windows.

Good luck. I hope that this works for you.