2003 - Lost Personal.xls

[matthewR]

One of my peeps has lost her personal.xls. When she goes to window to unhide it , it is dimmed out. How can she get it back. I went to help to look at disabled items but it wasn't there. She got out of excel and reopened but nada. Should she reboot or ??

[HansV]

Personal.xls is stored by default in the user profile, in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART in Windows XP, or in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART in Windows Vista or Windows 7.

The Application Data / AppData folder is hidden, so you must show hidden files and folders in Windows Explorer to see it.

Can you find Personal.xls in the user's profile?

[matthewR]

I found my excel personal.xls. I sent her a screen shot of where mine is. If she can't find her personal.xls in the same place, what can she do?

[HansV]

If she doesn't have a Personal.xls in her XLSTART folder, she could search her hard disk to see if it has inadvertently been moved (unlikely as that seems).
If not, does she have a recent backup of her hard disk, or at least of her profile?

[matthewR]

She rebooted and she has her personal.xls back. Sorry for the panic.

[HansV]

All's well that ends well...