New Workbooks - Excel 2007

I’m experiencing an oddity with Excel 2007. When I open Excel via program, not via a specific file, Excel will create a new document. This document is always in compatibility mode and contains 3 sheets at the bottom.

I have changed Excel to have all new documents be in the new format and contain 1 sheet, and if I click the office button and select new->blank document, I get what I expect. It is NOT in compatibility mode and it has 1 sheet.

If I click the “new workbook” icon (I added it to my QuickAccess Toolbar for testing purposes) then I get a workbook in compatibility mode with 3 sheets.

So, to sum up… Clicking the “new workbook” icon or shortcut and/or opening up Excel works differently than creating a new workbook via the office button->new option in Excel 2007. Clicking the icon or opening Excel appears to completely ignore my default workbook settings I have specified under the office button->excel options->save.

I do not appear to have any custom templates causing this. This isn’t how Excel behaves on my computer at home (it works as I expect it should).

Any ideas?

Okay...partially solved. Excel 2007 didn't show I had any templates because they were not in the templates folder. I did, however, have a book.xlt template in the XLSTART folder. Once I deleted this file (which was old and in the older Excel format - subsequently causing the compatibility mode) then the new button started behaving as it should. Unfortunately, when I open Excel without opening a file, I don't get a new blank document -> I have to always click the new button. New problem...potential solution is probably out there.

Slowly but surely. Okay...I had a personal.xls file. This file was causing no new file to open when I opened Excel (never had that problem with Office XP). I had to open the file in Excel and save as personal.xlsb (binary). Now when I open excel I automatically get a new file.

Only problem that remains (which I just recently discovered), is that when I double-click on an Excel file - Excel opens, but the file doesn't open. If I open Excel first...and then double-click on a file, the file will open in Excel.

Well...not entirely true.

Files ending in .xlsx will open just fine.
Old files ending in .xls will NOT open...I must go through extra steps to open them.

This is a new problem too...it didn't start until after I removed the book.xls from the XLSTART folder.

This problem is so stupid...as soon as I fix one thing it breaks something else. Okay...I can open .XLS files now...but only if they don't have spaces in the filename. If there is a space in the filename, such as:

C:\Lotus\This filename stinks.xls

Then I get these error messages:

Unable to find c:\Lotus\this.xlsx
Unable to find filename.xlsx
Unable to find stinks.xlsx

Then the actual file opens up just fine...hunky dorey. I just get several error messages.

Ugh - By the way, I fixed the beforementioned problem by reassigning the .XLS extension back to Excel...it has skipped to somewhere else.

All problems solved - I played around with it some more and I basically toyed with the file associal properties until it started working. I'm not really sure what I changed to fix the problem, but I did toggle the setting in Excel for "ignore DDE connections" (which is related to the file extensions apparantly).

I suppose I'll keep this thread here as a reference for anyone else who has Excell 2007 get possessed with problems .