Excel error: “style ‘comma’ not found”

Question : Excel error:  “style ‘comma’ not found”

Originally, I built this spreadsheet in Lotus 123.  I later imported it into Excel 97.  It worked fine then.  As I have upgraded Excel, the spreadsheet has continued to work fine.

Recently, I bought a new machine (running Windows XP), and I installed Office XP.  This version of Office uses Excel ver. 10.2614.2625.

The problem is that now, when I want to format a number in a cell (single or multiple), I am unable to.  My question askes about using the “comma” function, but the problem is the same for every change in number type — currency, percentage, comma, etc.

When I try to change the format of a number, I get an error box that says, “style ‘comma’ not found”.  Or style ‘percentage’, or style ‘currency’, etc.  This means it will not allow a change from say “0.02” to “2.0%”, or from “30000” to “30,000”.

What could I possibly have done to make this happen?  By the way, this does not happen on other spreadsheets, so it is not an Excel-wide problem, just this spreadsheet.

I would appreciate any thoughts.

Thank you.


Solution: Excel error:  “style ‘comma’ not found”

Is this a big spreadsheet? Excel has a limit of 4000 different formats–and you may be running into problems associated with that. If you apply your formats by copying cells, then each one counts against the limit of 4000–even if they are exactly the same.

Microsoft Knowledge Base gives techniques for removing all the styles, then restoring the default ones. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;291321

Microsoft Knowledge Base also gives instructions for removing corruption form an Excel file. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5Bln%5D;291057

or the webcast at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5Bln%5D;325496