Forum Discussion

311battey's avatar
311battey
Copper Contributor
Feb 09, 2020

Recovery of personal.xlsb lost on Excel update.

10 days ago I changed from Office 2016 to O365.  Is there anyway to recover my former personal.xlsb file that was lost in this process??   
excel
Macros and VBA
office 365
311battey's avatar
311battey
Copper Contributor
Feb 10, 2020

JKPieterse 

 

Ok.  Thanks.

 

Assume the previous MS Office applications had become corrupted (which is what I was told and prompted the tech to refresh O365) is there any way to reinstall/refresh the Office applications and not lose the existing options and configurations like the personal.xlsb files?  Should I have expected the xlstart folder to disappear when I re installed / updated O365? 

 

Thanks. 

JKPieterse's avatar
JKPieterse
Silver Contributor
Feb 10, 2020
Normally the XLSTART folder remains untouched on a reinstall of Office, but if they used some tool to thoroughly remove a preextisting installation it may very well have removed that folder. In future, I would just not use personal.xlsb but rather a workbook saved in a folder somewhere so that it is included in your companies backup schemes.
  • 311battey's avatar
    311battey
    Copper Contributor
    Feb 10, 2020

    JKPieterse 

     

    I like your suggestion about using a different file.

     

    Since the Excel installation did not go as planned and may have been incomplete, do you think it would be wise to just remove this installation of O365 and do a clean install?

     

    Thanks for all of your help.

    • JKPieterse's avatar
      JKPieterse
      Silver Contributor
      Feb 11, 2020
      If your Office appears to work as expected I see no reason to reinstall it.
      • 311battey's avatar
        311battey
        Copper Contributor
        Feb 17, 2020

        JKPieterse

         

        OK.  I found an old  personal.xlsb file from my image backups and replaced a newly created personal.xlsb file in the XLSTART folder with the old file. 

         

        Now when Excel starts it generates the following error message:

         
         

         

        Clicking on the Help button gives the following:

         

         

        So 2 questions:

        Why do my VBA Declare statements have to be changed now when they worked before and more importantly, what's with the error message when I try to use the help button?  This is a single user PC and I have full administrator rights.

         

        Thanks.