Recovery of personal.xlsb lost on Excel update.

[311battey]

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??   

[#2]

The file should still be there. It is normally located in a folder you can reach by typing this into Windows Explorer's address bar and pressing enter:
%appdata%\microsoft\Excel\XLSTART

[#3]

@Jan Karel Pieterse 

When I started Excel after it was "reinstalled" I started the program, activated the developer tab and looked for my  macros.  They were not there and personal.xlsb did not show up as a possible location in the Excel macros selection window.  I closed Excel and tried File Explorer but it could not find XLStart or personal.xlsb in my Windows 10 user folder.  I started Excel again, created a simple macro in personal.xlsb, closed Excel (and saved personal.xlsb).  The personal.xlsb file now exists in appdata\roaming\microsoft\Excel\XLStart  and is easily located by FIle Explorer.   This new personal.xlsb file contains only the simple macro I created above.

Any idea where I might find my old personal.xlsb file so I can get my macros back?

[#4]

All I can think of is hopefully a backup?

[#5]

@Jan Karel Pieterse 

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. 

[#6]

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.

[#7]

@Jan Karel Pieterse 

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.

[#8]

If your Office appears to work as expected I see no reason to reinstall it.

[#9]

@Jan Karel Pieterse

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.

[#10]

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.