Mac OSX problem - tearing hair out!

[Dave2002]

I just noticed a problem with my OSX installation and Microsoft Excel. I'm running High Sierra 10.13.6 and Excel 2011.

I edited a file to create a new one in Excel. Then I printed it. When I went to the printer I found not the file I expected, but a web page which had just been created in Firefox - the result of a web search on a website.

I thought I'd made a mistake, so went back, killed off Firefox, then printed again - again from within Excel.

Same thing!

Then I shut down the machine, reloaded, went back into Excel and this time rather than waste paper, "printed" to a PDF file.

Exactly the same thing!

It's not desperate now, as I have the file ready to go, and if I can ever get this sorted I'll get a print out, but this behaviour does rather suggest something nasty has got into the system. Could it be a problem within the Excel package, or OS X - or just the printer driver - something else?

I'll start running virus checkers and looking for other possible causes.

Any reasonably helpful and sensible suggestions will be appreciated. I'll get back later, if I still have any hair left.

[Pulcinella]

What does the Print Preview pane show?
Not sure if it will help, but it might enable you to track down where the glitch is happening.

You are of course using neither the latest OS or version of Excel, which is likely not to be helping the situation!

[Dave2002]

What does the Print Preview pane show?
Not sure if it will help, but it might enable you to track down where the glitch is happening.

You are of course using neither the latest OS or version of Excel, which is likely not to be helping the situation!

Mmmm. This has been working until fairly recently.

I haven't "upgraded" to Mojave yet, and indeed only a week or so back I saw a post elsewhere from someone who had with a comment that he hated it so much that he reverted immediately. I think High Sierra is normally OK. I was getting round to doing the migrate to Mojave, but needed to do some fairly extensive housekeeping done in order to get recent updates working, and further work would be needed to install Mojave. I postponed the move to Mojave once I read the adverse post.

An interesting discovery re the MS package. I'm not too worried about the version being 2011 - I don't want to move to a subscription or pay MS any more money for a new version if I can avoid it. I normally have the updates on this version dealt with.

However, checking to see if there are any updates to Excel 2011 I discovered that the updater progam itself may have a problem. That dates from 2010. Presumably it's a 32 bit programme, which would need to be replaced with a 64 bit programme in order to do any updates. Then of course there may not be any updates which are appropriate, but in the first instance the updater program may now be part of the problem. If I can find a newer version of the updater program that might solve the problem - though the difficulty might lie elsewhere. Checking again though, the problem might be that the remote server is not available, and the Excel updater does still work. I'm not sure.

Re looking at the printout in Preview - it has clearly picked up the results of the web search done within Firefox on a local authority site - I wanted to know about bin days, rather than the file I want to print.

PS: Earlier I looked at the printout in Preview from within the Excel package. I tried opening the file in Preview, and that does find the correct file, and it does print - though the printout size is smaller than I would have liked. Looks as though the problem is in the internal interface between Excel and the printer - either PDF or the real one. How that's picking up fragments of files from elsewhere I don't know.

[french frank]

As an OSX and Microsoft Office user, I cannot imagine how your problem occurred. I usually keep OS and programs as up to date as possible, and am currently running Mojave and Microsoft Office 2016. I test drive the OSX upgrades on my Macbook to make sure all of the small programs still function - they usually do - and have never found the OSX upgrades a problem. I tend to upgrade Macbooks and iMacs alternately, and usually upgrade programs such as Microsoft Office with the new machine which I then download to the old machine when I'm satisfied there are no problems.

If I have to fork out £100 or so to make any necessary program upgrades, I consider it a good investment in that it always avoids problems (because I always have one machine functioning properly anyway). In practice, the only inconvenience is with occasional software upgrades: how the devil do you set up a Word 2016 template for two A5 pages, side by side?

[Dave2002]

I can install Office 365 if I really feel a need to - we have a copy which hasn't been installed on any machine yet, so no need to give Microsoft any extra dosh just yet. Having struggled with MS software for many years, not only Word, Excel etc., but also Windows, the less I can send in the direction of that company the happier I will be - or perhaps conversely, as currently I can't send less than nothing.

I hear that Office 2016 is quite good, and now I think there's an Office 2019. If I have to buy it I'll probably go for the one off purchase and hope it'll be good for another 10 years (some chance ...!) and I'll never have to buy another one again.

Excel is one of the programs which is quite good, but really most of the time I can get by without using MS software or having to buy new software every year. I do use Word, but to be honest I usually write my text in Open Office first, then convert to Word if I send to someone else. Sometimes I use Scrivener. I no longer have any kind of regular need to use Powerpoint.