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General discussion

excel dialog box lost color

Mar 24, 2007 2:19AM PDT

My excel 2003 dialog boxes have no color. Say, for example Cntrol+P. The commands are grey shadows. They all work Ok, at least I don't think some command isn't showing up. I uninstalled and then reinstalled but same result, but it might not have been deep enough as all my old settings and prior used files show up on the file menue. I didn't want to go into the registry. I also tried accessablity in control panel, the display, themes etc.

thanks
bretsharon

Discussion is locked

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Excel Dialog Box Lost Color
May 19, 2009 12:25AM PDT

Same problem in Excel Office 2003. Did you find out what was causing the problem? Find a solution?

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A possible fix
Mar 25, 2010 6:04AM PDT

I had the same problem. I followed the advice below and it was fixed:

(adapted from http://www.officearticles.com/excel/troubleshooting_microsoft_excel.htm)

What we're doing is removing Excel from the Windows registry. You don't need to enter values in the registry. When you launch Excel again, it will re-register itself, so you can expect it to take a little longer to launch than usual.

The re-registry process may reset some user options to factory values, so you may have to adjust Excel?s look and feel to your liking, using the normal Excel controls, after this is done.

So, let's go...
__________________________________________________________

Left-click Start, then Run, and type ?regedit? (without the quotes) and hit Enter. Browse, just like you would in Windows Explorer or My Computer, to the following folder:

My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\"X.X"\Excel

"X.X" will be as follows, depending on your version of Word:
? Excel 2000 is 9.0
? Excel 2002/XP is 10.0
? Excel 2003 is 11.0
? Excel 2007 is 12.0

Once you find it, right click the Excel folder, and choose Rename. Rename it to OldExcel. (This is a quickie method of backing up your registry.) Close the Registry Editor.

Launch Excel. The re-registry process will put up a couple of information screens and Excel will eventually start. This should take care of the problem.

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A couple of things
Mar 25, 2010 7:39AM PDT

1] Since the original post was 3 years ago, I would think they have solved the problem in one way or another.

2] What exactly does your fix fix? It seems unrelated to the original problem.

Mark