The instant I try saving a particular excel document excel will crash.
How do I solve this problem, I've tried saving as different excel formats but I got the same result, except for when I saved it as a text file which worked.
This is in excel 2013 I've tried repairing but I haven't tried reinstalling because it only does this for a specific file.
NOTE: When I open excel again in the autorecover pane the name of the file shows up with the word "repaired" in red.
55 Answers
The new '.xlsb' or binary format tends to be much more stable, and can cut the on-disk file size by ~80% in many cases.
I've seen one or two larger files die inexplicably like yours did after years operating as a '.xls', but if you re-save them as an xlsb then this no longer appears to happen.
Oddly, if you save from the newly stable .xlsb back into the .xls, most files continue to crash on-save, which really does suggest to me that .xls just isn't able to handle the save operation on files that are more complex or unwieldy, but not necessarily corrupt.
1This thread was posted long ago, but I thought I'd share my experience anyway.
Had the same problem and eventually traced it to one of the worksheets that I copied from another Excel file which had external links in it. I deleted that worksheet and copied all the data (as values, to remove the links) instead of copying the worksheet itself.
Works fine now. Hope this helps.
1We had a XLSM Excel 2013 workbook that was crashing on save, but only for some users. The problem was traced to a button that had been assigned the macro Workbook_Open() (from the Workbook macros). This seems to corrupt the button. To fix the problem we created a specific macro for the button that calls Workbook_Open(), then we deleted the button and re-created it with the new macro assigned to it in place of Workbook_Open().
I had issues as well, but it was saving as a Macro-enabled file. I changed to normal and all is working fine.
1You can try opening the file in LibreOffice or OpenOffice, and then resaving it.
Both of those office suites are completely free of charge.
Sometimes programs in those suites can open files that cause problems in other office tools.
