Hey Matt, My Excel Is broken!

A funny thing happened on my way to this forum… or I should say in my nondescript office in downtown Chicago. One of my users, and next door office neighbor, stepped into my doorway and blurted out that her “Excel was broken.” She continued on by saying she knew the cause - my colleague had just put on some critical patches and updates via WSUS (she’d been out of the office for a while, so her machine was catching up on updates), and shortly afterwards, she suddenly couldn’t open multiple files in Excel.

This was a new one - and my curiosity was piqued. So I strolled over to her desk to investigate. She quickly demonstrated that she couldn’t open more than one file in Excel. She had one file open, then went back into a folder in Windows Explorer to open another. When she double-clicked on another file, rather than opening it, Excel just came back to the first open file. But I noticed something pretty quickly - the original open file had a cell actively being edited. By design, Excel doesn’t allow many basic file operations when you are editing the contents of a cell.

I think I burst this user’s bubble slightly by uncovering the culprit. I clicked out of the cell, then showed her that Excel could now open multiple files. We both had a good laugh (albeit at her expense) - but I could tell she really wanted it to be due to some pesky patch. She asked how that could happen, and I said all it took was an errant keystroke or mouse-click to click into the cell.

It makes me wonder how many support calls actually get generated by something as innocent as an errant keystroke or mouse-click. I’ll ponder that over my next latte.