Forum Discussion

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??

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

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
Silver Contributor
Feb 11, 2020
If your Office appears to work as expected I see no reason to reinstall it.
- 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.
  - JKPieterse
    Silver Contributor
    Feb 18, 2020
    Apparently you installed 64 bit Office and your declare statements lack the PtrSafe keyword, see: https://jkp-ads.com/articles/apideclarations.asp . About Help not working: I presume there is a problem with your Office setup, perhaps a repair fixes this.