Excel 2003 menu or toolbars problem

Question

1. I have Excel 2003.   When I open a document from a shortcut on desktop, all I get is the active worksheet occupying the whole window.  There are no menu or toolbars and the close button doesn't work.  However, when I start in Excel and click on a recently used file, it's all normal.   Please help because I don't want to use a long-winded way to open files.

Answer 1

I'm not certain I know why this is happening from shortcuts, and I checked the command line switches for Excel and I don't find one to explicitly open Excel in Full Screen mode.  So I'm going to take a first stab with this recommendation:

Locate the file named Excel11.xlb on your system.  On my system it is in

C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel

where "yourusername" is the user name you log into the system with (not your password).

Rename that file to something like Excel11.xlb.old The next time you open Excel, that file will be recreated, and hopefully having a new Excel11.xlb file will affect the way that files are opened from shortcuts.

After you've renamed the file, first try opening Excel by itself.  Then shut it down and try opening one of your shortcuts to an Excel file and see if it works properly.

Let us know if this helps any or if it turned out to be a waste of time.  There are one or two other things I can think of to try to fix things.  Not necessarily sure that any of them will actually fix it for you.

Answer 2

Thanks for that update.  Even though it is an "it just fixed itself" type of deal, that could be valuable info to someone else with same problem in the future who stumbles onto this thread.

Hope it stays fixed for you for a while - Excel 2003 is still a very sweet version of Excel to have around.

Answer 3

It just corrected itself after I closed Excel with Task Manager.

Answer 4

Glad it's working for you again, and thanks for the feedback.

I'm curious: did you try renaming of Excel##.xlb file, or did it just kind of magically repair itself after you got it closed with Task Manager?

Answer 5

Hi, many thanks for your  time.   After a couple of frustrating hours, I used Task Manager to close Excel because there was no other way.    When I started it up again, everything was nornal again.   I hope it continues to work!  Thanks again.