Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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arthwollipot said:
The macro was a very simple one - a button to add a row to a protected table. That's literally all it did.
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Sure. So did it finish properly? Sometimes unforeseen circumstances cause macros to stall rather than complete. They look like they have worked OK but they freeze at the end. (That, or my coding is up to crap nowadays ;)) I've had similar "problems" in Excel VBA, where it won't save or even allow cell selection because of a stuck macro. Disconcerting!
 
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Norman Alexander said:
Sure. So did it finish properly? Sometimes unforeseen circumstances cause macros to stall rather than complete. They look like they have worked OK but they freeze at the end. (That, or my coding is up to crap nowadays ;)) I've had similar "problems" in Excel VBA, where it won't save or even allow cell selection because of a stuck macro. Disconcerting!
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The macro, as far as I could tell, was working perfectly.
 
jimbob said:
Was a macro still recording?
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No, the original macro was created, probably, years ago in a document that is now used as a template. Ie. open the document, make changes, Save As to make a copy, close the original without saving. This team had been doing this for I don't know how long. It was just this one time it was having a problem.

Like I said, I tried everything. I've used and supported Microsoft Word since prior to 1995 and I know all the tricks. I am a Word Power User. If I can't solve this mystery, it is unsolvable.
 
arthwollipot said:
Just had a bit of a blow to my professional pride.

Client was working in a macro-enabled Word document. She selects Save As, edits the filename and selects the location and clicks Save. Word thinks for a few seconds then the Save As dialog box comes back up and the document is not saved. Tried multiple different filenames and locations, same result. No indication in Properties or Protection of any issue. I absolutely could not determine the cause of the problem. I tried every trick I've learned about Word documents since 1995. No luck. The document just would not save.

She had to finalise the document somehow tonight, so I closed it as an unresolved issue.
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I have had the unsaveable Word document a couple of times. Nothing you can do, as far as I can see. You can rescue some of the content by copying it into a new document, but that is about it. Not much use for a document with macros in it.
 
arthwollipot said:
Just had a bit of a blow to my professional pride.

Client was working in a macro-enabled Word document. She selects Save As, edits the filename and selects the location and clicks Save. Word thinks for a few seconds then the Save As dialog box comes back up and the document is not saved. Tried multiple different filenames and locations, same result. No indication in Properties or Protection of any issue. I absolutely could not determine the cause of the problem. I tried every trick I've learned about Word documents since 1995. No luck. The document just would not save.

She had to finalise the document somehow tonight, so I closed it as an unresolved issue.
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I recently had a Word document that refused to print. It would say it was printing, but it would vanish into the ether; not printing, not sitting in the print queue, nothing. Just gone. It was a document containing nothing but the company letterhead, so it was used for any official letter. If I converted it into a PDF, it would print, but not the original Word document. We eventually determined that the new printer apparently doesn't like the font that was used to type the company address at the bottom of the page. Once it was changed to a different font, it printed just fine.
 
I've got a web based medical records and scheduling program used by a lot of my user base.

There's one specific type of report (out of dozens of reports routinely printed) that when one specific role of user prints to a specific type of printer cause it to print one page... wait 60 seconds or so... then print another page... then wait 60 seconds or so... then print another page. If the report is 20 pages long (which is about average) it can take damn near a half hour to print a report.

It doesn't happen with any other report, any other use role, or any other type of printer.

Computers are weird.
 
JoeMorgue said:
It doesn't happen with any other report, any other use role, or any other type of printer.

Computers are weird.
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I had a similarly weird thing years ago. A customer was running some our code on an AS400. Every now and then one particular job would die on a missing file error. It seemed completely random, and we couldn't find any reason for it.

But after several months we realized it only happened on Wednesdays, and only when the job was initiated on a terminal where the second character of the Workstation ID was the letter E. We tested and confirmed that was the trigger for the error.

That did finally point us in the right direction and I found the problem (field overlap in a data area). But that remains the weirdest combination of factors to trigger a bug I think I've ever run across.
 
Wudang said:
Could her windows credentials have expired? Nothing in eventvwr?
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Nope.

alfaniner said:
Open dialogue window is open and hidden under the main one? That's got me a few times.
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And nope.

Hellbound said:
Hmmm.

Over-zealous anti-virus? Any Office doc with a Macro tends to make AV nervous.

Especially if the save location was remote (a server or file share) instead of local.
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Nope. All macros that run in our environment have to be digitally signed by our IT Security unit.

Armitage72 said:
I recently had a Word document that refused to print. It would say it was printing, but it would vanish into the ether; not printing, not sitting in the print queue, nothing. Just gone. It was a document containing nothing but the company letterhead, so it was used for any official letter. If I converted it into a PDF, it would print, but not the original Word document. We eventually determined that the new printer apparently doesn't like the font that was used to type the company address at the bottom of the page. Once it was changed to a different font, it printed just fine.
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I once had a similar issue - it was a much earlier version of Word. It would spool a few pages without any trouble, but when it got to a certain page it crashed Word. I copied all the preceding pages to a new document - no problem. I copied all of the later pages - no problem.

Okay, said I, the problem is somewhere on this page. I copied the top half of the page - no problem. I copied the bottom half of the page - problem.

Aha, said I, the problem is somewhere on the bottom half of this page.

Repeating this process several times, I narrowed the problem down to one single letter - a lower case "a". I went back to the original document, deleted and re-typed the "a", and it printed perfectly.
 
arthwollipot said:
I once had a similar issue - it was a much earlier version of Word. It would spool a few pages without any trouble, but when it got to a certain page it crashed Word. I copied all the preceding pages to a new document - no problem. I copied all of the later pages - no problem.

Okay, said I, the problem is somewhere on this page. I copied the top half of the page - no problem. I copied the bottom half of the page - problem.

Aha, said I, the problem is somewhere on the bottom half of this page.

Repeating this process several times, I narrowed the problem down to one single letter - a lower case "a". I went back to the original document, deleted and re-typed the "a", and it printed perfectly.
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That's almost certainly an unprintable character. It may be hidden as well. Have run into those bastages before too. The Windows print routine has a conniption fit trying to figure it out and then gives up. Delete the one letter or word and you have also deleted the hidden thing. Retype, and the world is bright again. Grrr... You have used just about the only way to find it, so well done.
 
Norman Alexander said:
That's almost certainly an unprintable character. It may be hidden as well. Have run into those bastages before too. The Windows print routine has a conniption fit trying to figure it out and then gives up. Delete the one letter or word and you have also deleted the hidden thing. Retype, and the world is bright again. Grrr... You have used just about the only way to find it, so well done.
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Yep, that's how I learned that that could happen. Boy, that was a long time ago. Probably around 1996 or so, I think.
 
I converted the Word document to a PDF, and then converted it back into a Word document, and it still wouldn't print. If I removed the graphics at the top of the page, it wouldn't print. If I removed the text at the bottom of the page, it would print. I tried removing the text a bit at a time, and it wouldn't print until all of the text had been removed. Once the font was changed, it printed.
 
JimOfAllTrades said:
I had a similarly weird thing years ago. A customer was running some our code on an AS400. Every now and then one particular job would die on a missing file error. It seemed completely random, and we couldn't find any reason for it.

But after several months we realized it only happened on Wednesdays, and only when the job was initiated on a terminal where the second character of the Workstation ID was the letter E. We tested and confirmed that was the trigger for the error.

That did finally point us in the right direction and I found the problem (field overlap in a data area). But that remains the weirdest combination of factors to trigger a bug I think I've ever run across.
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That reminds me of a problem when I first worked at Boeing. A particular 767 was getting random failure messages on the flap system. It was eventually traced to a short in a wire to the armrest of a particular seat, which at some point in its journey ran next to one in the flap system. The error only occurred when a passenger moved the armrest, causing a current spike which induced a current in the flap wire.
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh Station was cool. I like how we're getting occasional glimpses into what Hanners is doing, but I like her character and I hope she comes back as a regular soon.

Seriously, QC is my soap opera. I re-read the complete archive from time to time.
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I visit daily, along with The Whiteboard, Freefall and xkcd.
 
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