Why does Excel pop up a window that says Publishing when VBA script runs? What is it publishing? Where is it Publishing to? Is it necessary? If not can it be inhibited?

Question

I downloaded a Excel workbook with a data sheet and a form sheet and a VBA script to fill the form sheet with rows of data from the data sheet and then prints the form to a PDF. When I run the VBA script a pop up window comes up and says Publishing and has a progress bar. What is publishing in this context? Is it the export to PDF or is it compiling data from data sheet into form sheet? Or is it something else? In any event it runs forever and at the top of the screen it eventually says 'Excel is unresponsive' . I didn't see this behavior when I tested with 20 rows but when I expanded to 1000 rows it did and after a couple hours and only a dozen PDFs generated I killed in Task Manager.

Any help you can provide or insight to shed light on the issue is appreciated.

Answer 1

Recompiling your macro often resolves this issue on Microsoft Excel. If you haven’t already, see the steps below to recompile your Excel VBA Macro.

Access the Developers tab in Microsoft Excel.

Click on Visual Basic.

Go to the Tools tab and click on Options.

In the new window, access the General tab.

Enable the Compile on Demand option under the Compile section. Hit OK to save the changes.

Restart Microsoft Excel.