But there are no macros!

My Excel 97 workbooks, which I use on both my PC and my Pocket PC, had been working perfectly up until a few days ago. Then suddenly, when I opened one of them on my PC after synching the Pocket PC, Excel indicated that the file contained macros. Further, it indicated that the macros were Excel version 4.0, could not be disabled, and could contain viruses. I created the workbook, I didn't use macros, and I certainly didn't include any macro viruses.

Now, when I try to use these same workbooks (now with "macros") on my Pocket PC, they won't open. Not good. I've had to rebuild the workbooks from backups twice now. Really not good.

Please note two things:

1. I have scanned all files and my whole system for viruses and malware, more than once, before and since this started happening. Nothing suspicious showed up, to the best of my knowledge.

2. I have never programmed macros into the workbooks. There are formulas but no macros. When I check the VB editor, there are no modules showing in any of the workbooks.

I read on an Excel help site that a spurious "disable macros" message coming from a file with no macros can be created by a leftover module created by Excel security. I tried to remove it using the instructions given, but (see #1) could not locate the module - or any others.

I notice that the problem seems to occur either after I have used the file on the Pocket PC and then synched, or when I've cut and pasted data from another Excel workbook (without macros).

What's going on here? Is Excel the problem, are the files corrupted, or is it the Pocket PC? Advice appreciated, thanks in advance.

Thanks for your advice - however I think you misunderstood the problem.

I'm quite aware that MS products do security checks for macros when opening files. This has happened without incident in the past 5 years that I've been using Excel files on both my PDA and my desktop machine.

Excel never found macros in the files before. Yet just in the past month, it's been finding "macros" in files where I never placed macros.

I can't "get used to this", because after Excel finds the "macros" in the file on my desktop machine, the resulting saved file becomes unrecognizable to the PDA.

Further, I just installed Office 2K, suspecting that Excel 97 was the problem. I was wrong - it's still finding macros where there are none.

I need to be able to synch these files and use them on both the PDA and the desktop PC - does anyone recognize what the problem is? I have a sinking feeling that it's a loss of connectivity and I may need to replace the PDA.

Some useful advice would be much appreciated.