Can't click ActiveX CommandButtons in Excel 2016 and they are not appearing correctly

Question

I have several spreadsheets with ActiveX CommandButton objects that I used to invoke my macros.  These all worked fine up until a few days ago (~ 13 Jan 2019) when strange issues started to occur.

The buttons will now only respond intermittently to clicks, and sometimes not at all.  If they do start to respond, it is only briefly and then they stop responding again.  The weird thing is that the buttons do continue to respond correctly and consistently to the associated accelerator keys.

In addition, the buttons are now not being painted correctly.  The 3 strange looking rectangles in the image below are the buttons.

This issue is occurring across multiple spreadsheets.  I am running Excel 2016 32-bit under Windows 10 on an MS Surface device.  It is a monthly-subscription installation so updates are being automatically applied.  I can't see anything in the history of the updates that might obviously be related.

Any advice or news from others suffering the same issue would be appreciated.

David.

Answer 1

After a week of working normally, the buttons on my spreadsheet have started playing up again.  Every time I click a button, the font of the button gets a bit smaller.  I've noticed that the height and width properties of the buttons are changing without any visible change to the actual height and width of the button occurring.

It's looking like I'll have to recreate my personal.xlsb file again.  Is this a known defect for which a fix is being worked on?

Answer 2

For what it is worth ….

I had a very similar issue. When I clicked on an ActiveX control, it would not function. A shadow of the control would appear a little bit to the left and slightly above the control. This happened with combo boxes and command buttons, and likely other controls -- but these were the only ones I was using.

I am running Windows 2010 and Excel 2016. This issue would not occur on the same PC running Excel 2010. Also if I moved the Excel file to another pc, the problem did not occur.

I followed the instructions from Vijay to first test in safe mode. In safe mode the problem did not occur. I then went to disable the addins, but there were no active addins to disable. So I activated all available Add-Ins and then tested. Problem disappeared. I then disabled all the active addins and then tested. Problem no longer appeared.

I have no idea why this worked!

Answer 3

Thanks for the input.  I'm still having ongoing issues with my buttons increasing or decreasing in size.  No idea why.  I've tried your idea of activating and deactivating the addins.  Will have to give it a few days to see if this resolves the issue.