Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Helping You Out, part 2

Anonymous said on 1/8/08:


I am in desperate need of help. My firm has a special toolbar they use to make sure all reports we generate are formatted in a specific way. I think it must involve a lot of custom formats because now I keep getting an error message saying "Too many custom formats" whenever I try to do anything. I tried deleting some of the custom formats but that doesn't seem to work. Any ideas?



This one is tough because I think the problem is probably the code that formats your report.  It's probably in Visual Basic for Applications, and your IT group would have to trouble shoot the problem.  Can you tell if the error message is from excel or from the "special toolbar"?


I do have one suggestion, though.  If you try this, please save a copy of your work and perform these steps on the copy, so that you don't lose any of the work you have done so far.



  1. Select all entire worksheet (one easy way to do this is to hit shift-ctrl-down arrow-right arrow from cell A1)

  2. Select Edit-->Clear-->Formats

  3. Now, rerun the script on the special toolbar.


What I'm trying to have you do is clear all the formats so the macros in the toolbars can have an easier time doing their thing.  Without knowing anything, I would guess that you might be working on a sheet that has a lot of formats maybe even in cells that don't contain data.  Clearing out all the formats might all the scripts on the toolbar to do the work it needs to do.


I hope this helps. I suspect that it may not.  If you try, though, please do it on a copy!

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