Edit Links -> Change Source irreparably corrupts xlsb workbook

Copper Contributor

This appears to be an Excel bug, which I'd like to lodge somewhere though I don't know where. The sequence of actions followed yields the 'something is wrong' message from Excel when you try to open the workbook again after saving, and letting Excel try to repair this yields a 'Workbook is corrupt' message. This was reproduced on a colleague's machine as well. Windows 10, Excel 2016.

 

How to reproduce bug:

  • I have uploaded two files containing only minimal data. One is called SourceReport and one is TargetReport. Save these somewhere and open both workbooks.
  • Xlsb uploads are disallowed as uploads on this site, and I found out in the course of writing this message that the problem goes away for xlsx. These reports are auto-generated as xlsb however, and we typically retain that format for file size reasons. So I've uploaded the files as xlsx extension and they then need to be both saved as xlsb format.
  • With both xlsb files open, right-click on the sheet 'Bottlenecks' > Move or Copy > Select 'TargetReport' in Workbook drop-down. Tick the 'Create a Copy' box.
  • The Bottlenecks sheet contains references (within the sparklines) to the two other sheets present in the SourceReport. In the TargetReport workbook, go to Edit Links >Change Source and choose the TargetReport.xlsb file itself (so that the sparklines copied across now point to the same data in TargetReport). You will see the sparkline data update visually.
  • Save the TargetReport workbook.
  • Now try to open the TargetReport workbook. The 'something is wrong' message appears. The workbook is now corrupted.

Does anyone know where to lodge this bug? Having found out half way through writing this that I can just convert to xlsx, that solves the issue for myself, but I still think I should try to lodge the bug somewhere.

3 Replies
I can reproduce the bug and will report it.

Thank you Jan Karel

Do you have a link to where this bug is posted so that I can watch its progress?

I'm afraid not, it is in a private mailing list :)