TM1 Forum

This is one that seems to appear intermittently; I've never been able to find the cause of it, much less a solution other than kicking over Excel and restarting it.

Occasionally a large grey block appears on the left hand side of the worksheet window, below the formula bar and name bar and extending to the status bar. It isn't tied to any individual worksheet window; you can resize or pane to your heart's content and it just won't budge.

The Grey Block Of Doom is illustrated in the attachment.

Does anyone know of a way of preventing / fixing this other than a restart of Excel?

Alan

I have never experienced the Grey Block of Doom, but it looks remarkably similar to the Blue Block of Demo Death (same position and size) that I got whenever I tried to show ISB to a prospective client.

("Look! You can dice and slice in the spreadsheet itself - oooh now isn't THAT a great visual effect, and so BLUE! Now let's have a little chat about your requirements whilst I reboot, shall we?")

Of course it can't be the same thing as I was assured that "nobody else has ever had this problem"

You wouldn't be playing with that particular nest of bugs would you?

Can't say it's ever happened to me...

John Hobson wrote:Alan

I have never experienced the Grey Block of Doom, but it looks remarkably similar to the Blue Block of Demo Death (same position and size) that I got whenever I tried to show ISB to a prospective client.

("Look! You can dice and slice in the spreadsheet itself - oooh now isn't THAT a great visual effect, and so BLUE! Now let's have a little chat about your requirements whilst I reboot, shall we?")

Of course it can't be the same thing as I was assured that "nobody else has ever had this problem"

You wouldn't be playing with that particular nest of bugs would you?

Sounds yummy! But no, it's definitely not an ISB-containing sheet; I haven't used (operationally) an ISB for years.

I've also had this on occasion in a non-TM1 session, so I don't think it's TM1 related. It's a relative rarity; probably wouldn't happen more than once every few months, if that. It looks exactly like an empty task pane, just on the wrong side. (And covering the workbook instead of pushing it to the side. More annoying than critical.

Have you tried dragging a docked menu bar to be a floating taskbar, then re-docking it? Often (for whatever reason) this fixes Excel screen rendering glitches.

lotsaram wrote:Have you tried dragging a docked menu bar to be a floating taskbar, then re-docking it? Often (for whatever reason) this fixes Excel screen rendering glitches.

Didn't try that, but I shall next time. (I tried toggling various toolbars off and on, but that didn't do anything.) Thanks.

I too have had this GBoD on the left and have noted that it is in the same position as the document recovery pane that is presented when you restart Excel after a crash.
I have gotten into the habit of never using the post crash session of Excel, other than saving the recovered file/s before manually closing down and restarting.
It may be a coincidence, but since adopting this, I have not been pulling my hair out as much as the problem has gone away.
BTW I found that moving a docked menu bar only temporarily fixed the issue.

Odd coincidence; I hadn't had this happen for weeks but after yesterday's post, did this morning.

I initially tried Lotsa's suggestion of the floating toolbar; that didn't work as such but did work when I dragged a toolbar down and docked it on the left. An artefact of the GBotLS reappeared when I switched to another window, but shifting the toolbar down cleared it again.

And as per Oratia's post... this was a session which followed a crash. (Specifically one caused by rescheduling a chore )