Greetings,

Recently I've been working on two relatively large Excel applications, and
both have given me grief in terms of odd behavior from Excel. After a lot of
fooling around and awkward workarounds, I'm nearly convinced that I'm
basically bumping into Excel bugs.

Does anyone have experience with Microsoft's phone support for advanced
issues at $245 a pop? Will they still apply the charge if they determine an
issue to be an Excel problem?

Here's a quick summary of the problems I've found:

1) The Workbook_Open event handler fails to fire. I have a workbook with
multiple sheets. One is the main workhorse of the workbook and rather
complex. If that sheet is the active sheet when the workbook loads, then the
Workbook_Open event handler fails to fire. If another sheet is active when
the workbook loads, the event fires properly. (The workaround is to never
save the workbook while the complex main sheet is the active sheet, but
that's clearly a pain and not exactly user friendly.)

2) In the same workbook as above, again on the main sheet, VBA code will
quit without warning under some conditions. In one case, a menu operation
includes the deletion of some rows (e.g. Selection.Delete), but the VBA
routine quietly quits immediately after the call to the Delete method. To
illustrate:

 ...
 MsgBox ("Debug: Before Selection.Delete.")
 Selection.Delete
 MsgBox ("Debug: After Selection.Delete.")
 ...

The "before" message box appears, but the "after" message box never does.

3) In a different workbook, I have some cells with data validation turned
on. The allowed values are from a list and in-cell drop-downs are turned on.
The sheet has a Worksheet_Change event handler, and the event handler code
will quietly die somewhere in the middle when a cell is changed through an
in-cell drop-down. When I change such a cell by typing a new (allowed) value
into it, the event handler works ok and runs to completion. This problem is
actually quite easy to reproduce with a very small worksheet.

4) In the same spreadsheet as (3), Excel will hang during a certain
operation if the VBA development environment is open. I've traced my code
before the hang occurs, and it doesn't appear to be my problem. From the
debugger's perspective, the whole thing gets stuck on a End Sub statement.
The same code works fine under other conditions.

So, I'm about ready to call Microsoft about these issues, but I'm a little
nervous about how they're going to handle this. Is every issue going to cost
me $245? I don't want to make a $1000 phone call.

If any of these problems turns out to be because of my own stupidity, I'm ok
paying the money if I end up with a resolution. If, however, Excel is indeed
buggy, then if anything Microsoft owes me for all of the time I've spent on
these problems. Not that I expect them to pay me, but I don't want to pay the
support charge in that case.

By the way, I've been doing most of my work in Excel 2002 SP3, but I've
found the same behaviors in other versions including Excel 2003.

I'd appreciate any insights you can provide. Thanks!

Wolf