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VBA Bug: Macro in Excel Stops After A Workbook.Open Command

11th November 2005, 06:26 am by jkpieterse

Hi Everyone.

Although I have already reported this as a KB article sometime ago, I decided it to be useful to post this here too:

Sometimes Excel VBA behaves unexpectedly. Here is an example:

You are running code that is meant to open one or more files using the Workbooks.Open command. As soon as you hold down the shift key when this command is being processed, macro execution stops and your program is terminated entirely. This will even happen if you are e.g. editing an email message in Outlook whilst Excel VBA is processing the code in the background.

Read more on this page.

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse

Category: General, VBA Advanced, MVP, Bugs, Windows API, VBA, Workbook Object, File Operations  |  Comment (RSS)  |  Trackback

7 Comments

  1. XL-Dennis:

    J-K,

    Will MSFT solve it in a coming SP for 2003?

    Kind regards,
    Dennis

    14 November 2005, 10:13 am

  2. jkpieterse:

    I don’t know.

    They have just confirmed it is a bug.

    14 November 2005, 1:58 pm

  3. Billkamm:

    I know in Access shift is the bypass key. Is it possible that pressing shift during the open command is setup as a bypass key?

    I have noticed that when launching an Excel workbook from Windows shift does not bypass anything though.

    15 November 2005, 7:02 am

  4. Ray:

    Shift is the bypass key in Excel. It’s a way of stopping any macros running as you open Excel (used to be helpful before the dialog box now that gives the option to Enable or Disable macros).

    15 November 2005, 11:39 pm

  5. maricopajoe:

    Not a bug. Same thing happens in Word and is the same in MS Access, and for those of us from the Windows 3.11 days, holding the shift key down would cause startup items in the win.ini file not to load.

    I don’t know what I would do without the shift key being enabled. It is documented as not a bug at the microsoft site.

    23 November 2005, 7:12 pm

  6. Tony:

    On the Microsoft support page

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555263

    it states -

    Microsoft has confirmed this is a bug.

    25 October 2007, 9:09 am

  7. booke02:

    As a workaround, create another excel, set macro security to highest, and save. Now when you open the original excel, you will be able to bypass the macro that is activated by workbook_open

    6 May 2008, 4:55 am

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