Recently we have developed a new tool using office 2013 64 bit on windows 7.
This tool has active x control buttons and forms.
Most of the calculation in the tool across the sheets is linked to a pivot table that has its data source in an external database.
I save this pivot table without the source data.
After a while of development, I have noticed something very strange. After lots of troubleshooting we have pinpointed the reason of the strange crash behavior. Every single time I update the pivot table and then save and close the file, the file cannot be opened.
I can update the pivot table as much as I want and the file will continue to work perfectly. The moment I save it and re-open it, it crashes, giving me the vbe7.dll App Crash error with the time stamp etc...
The file will not open in safe mode, and it will crash several times giving me the only option to either restart or search for a solution and restart again. When it restarts it tries to repair or recover the broken file and crashes again with the same error.
We have found a small workaround. We can copy the earlier working version, open it, update the pivot then close it without touching anything else. This has the new copy working roughly 30% of the time, with no idea why. We still have to test and see whether
if the new refreshed (and filtered) pivot table is smaller than the original then it works, if it is bigger then it crashes, but I highly doubt it.
Also we have found that if we enable data connections from the advanced settings (enable for this session alone), it increases our chances of success.
This has become extremely frustrating. Sometimes the file that does not open on my computer can be opened on another computer that has excel 2007. If I save it on excel 2007, most of the time it will re-open on my machine until of course I have to update the
pivot table.
Any ideas on what might be causing this? Is there a next step I should do?