Excel 2003, copy and paste went crazy. Worked until 2 weeks ago. Only pastes as bitmap. Affects all documents. Paste special only offers bitmap with NO other choices available. Generate new document, am owner of same. On my personal PC, I am admin. Tried the MS Office repair to completion, no joy. I am copying not cutting… =) Paste and paste special same results.
Computer fine otherswise. No other issues, AV up to date, all Microsoft patches applied.
Only paste as bitmap, cannot manipulate the data any longer. Picture format bar pops up, file states it is .xls verified with windows explorer. Can not find any thing in options so far to account for this.
Any ideas??
Excel Only Pastes As Bitmap
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Try loading Excel in safe mode:
On the Start menu
Click Run
Type in: Excel.exe /s
or use the complete path, which will probably be:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Excel.exe /s
This will bypass all files in any Excel startup folder as well as Add-ins and some registry settings.
If the /s option didn’t work, the only other thing I can think of is to try:
/unregserver
Which will force Excel to unregister itself, then run
/regserver
Which will force Excel to re-register itself and then quit.
re: “Does Excel have an normal.dot equivalent?
Excel has 2 things that might be considered “equivalent” to normal.dot
personal.xls
Typically, a user would manually create this file, place their macros, etc. in it, set the worksheet to hidden and store it in the XLSTART folder.
Whenever Excel opens, it would open this file (hidden, of course) and all of the macros in it would be available for any open workbooks.
ExcelXX.xlb where XX is the version number of Excel that you are running.
This file is created by Excel and is typically stored in the user’s Application Data/Microsoft/Excel folder. If the user makes any changes to a toolbar (e.g. adding a custom macro button) a .xlb file is created and Excel stores the “custom toolbar” in it for use whenever Excel is open.
I can’t see either of these files causing the problem you’ve described unless someone physically did the work to create these files and make changes to some setting to force the “bitmap pasting” you are seeing.
I don’t even know what setting you would change via a macro or toolbar to make that happen.
Net resolution ended up being to remove Adobe Acrobat, Able2Doc, and Avery label addon.
Problem appears to have gone away.
WIll re-add one at a time to isolate, expect Avery (free) to be the culprit.
Many thanks to all that tried to help. Great forum and users!