Windows 10: Excel Icon on taskbar does not open file, only program

here's the link to my corrupt file problem from yesterday-
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/o...7-0e42787e8f3b

wayne

 

Best news of all- I have managed to recover most if not all of the data in the corrupted excel file. I found this
posting ( ohttps://support.office.com/en-us/art...__toc337637262 ) on the Office website and had tried the repair and extract options yesterday, hoping for a solution that would get the file back mostly intact. But I'm worried that might jeopardize things in the long run so I tried this article's idea of simply linking cell A1 in a blank worksheet to cell A1 of the worksheet that was corrupted. I was astonished
how easily it seems to have extracted the most important data in the three worksheets that are important. I can rebuild the formulas easily enough, but some of that 5000 rows of data would be difficult.

I would call this thread solved, except that the jumplists don't work and I can't even double-click on the workbook name to open in excel. Very weird.
Wayne

 

So glad you were able to recover your data! I'm going to ask a member here who knows Office really well; see if she can shed some light.

 

Hi Wayne:

Are you using the Quick Launch Bar or are you using the Task Bar? You can pin folders and files to Quick Launch, but not to Task Bar.

I just pinned an Excel file to the Task Bar and when I clicked on it, Excel opened as you described (without the file).

 

Hi Wynona, thanks for dropping in.

Wayne has the Excel shortcut pinned to the taskbar. When he right-clicks that icon, the jump list of recent files shows above the icon. Usually, you can click one of those recent files, and Excel will open that file. His problem is, it's not working like that and only opens Excel the program - then he has to go through the extra steps of opening the file. We've tried unpinning - re-pinning, clearing out the MRUs, and repairing Office (both local and online repair). Nothing has worked.

He did have one corrupt spreadsheet, which he has recovered into a new spreadsheet, and I'm wondering if that had anything to do with it? If so, is there a way to remedy now that the corrupted spreadsheet is gone? (It is gone now, right Wayne?)

 

well I always called it the quick-launch bar, but now win 10 seems to call it the task bar (as in, if you right click on one of those square-thingees on the win10 desktop, it gives you an option to "pin to taskbar". Whoever named it what, it is the space between Cortana input space on the bottom left of the traditional desktop and the bottom right where time, date, internet icons are located on the bottom right corner. I usually have about 10 icons in this launch/task area which represent my most-used programs, including IE, task manager, notepad, and Excel. Excel is the only one that has what simrick called jumplists, i.e. if you right click the Excel Icon, you see a list of the most recent files that have been opened or used regularly. Word also works
that way. Prior to 10 days ago, clicking a jump-list filename actually opened the file, but that no longer works. Worse, if I go to the folder where the file is and double-click to open, all I get is an error message "There was a problem sending the command to the program". If I right-click on the filename and select open, it does not open the file, only Excel.
Wayne

 

Just a thought - what has changed in the last 10 days on the computer? Ant new program installations?
Do you have a restore point you can go back to before this started happening?

 

OK, I see what you mean. I pinned Excel to the Task Bar and opened its jump list and clicked on a file. It opened as it should.

I don't think it's an Excel problem. It looks to me that it's a Windows problem.

Edit: I just pinned Word to the Task Bar and got the same result. However, what I'm seeing is that only those files I've worked on recently will show up when I right click on the app. But they open just fine for me.

I'm with Simrick; if you have one more than ten days old, I'd do a Restore.

 

As I think I mentioned somewhere, my backups have not been working; in fact the last time I tried to reset it was 10 days ago
and the restore point ran ok on Feb 7- 2 days ago- and that's the only on that has worked. This problem started probably over 10 days ago. I can't think of any other software updates, other than win 10 which is automatic . The last five, since Jan 18th are:
Realtek Audio Jan 18, Malwarebytes Feb 1, Panda Free Antivirus Feb 3, and CCleaner and Office 2013 Feb 8
Wayne

 

Did you possibly install the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware beta? That one did a number on my Office 365 2016 subscription; so much so that I had to do a clean install of Windows 10 Insider. MB decided that my O365 update files were malware. *Sad Since Office updates "silently" install . . .

Is your Office 2013 a standalone version or a subscription?

 

To Hideout/wynona, my (vague) recollection is that there was a significant win 10 update around the time that this problem started, but since Word works fine on the Taskbar I was leaning towards Excel. Other things, like not being able to double-
click an Excel filename at first suggests Win 10, except that that double-click works fine for .doc, .docx, .pdf files
in the same folder. So my bet is still on Excel.

Wayne

 

Just a thought- I may have gone into Excel/Options to fix something that was annoying me; is there anything in there
that might cause such an issue ?
Wayne

 

Hmmmm.....like what did you "fix"?

 

As Simrick asked, what was annoying you and how did you fix it. Maybe go back and undo the fix?

 

I can't say for certain, but one thing that was bugging me is Win 10 Mail, which insists on capitalizing the first letter of each row,
instead of the first letter of each sentence, which is what the parameter states. Word used to do that, but doesn't anymore.
(I know these are options in the Excel file, but I sometimes think they are generic to many MS products)

Apart from that, whatever I did set differently I know what that option does or doesn't do, I never change anything that I don't understand and I've probably been using Excel for 30 years.