Name Conflict: Print_Area

While upgrading our Windows XP PCs from Microsoft Office 2000 to Microsoft Office 2003 I encountered a strange bug in the way Excel stores the print area settings.



A user with Office 2003 could not open an XLS file created with Office 2000. An error dialog box would appear titled "Name Conflict" and containing the message "Name cannot be the same as a built-in name. Old name: Print_Area".

After some online research using the very helpful Name Manager I realized that there seemed to be a bug in the way the newer Excel interpreted the way the older version stored the print area that a user had set via the File->Print Area->Set Print Area option.

Opening the file with another copy of Office and clearing all the set print areas (using File->Print Area->Clear Print Area) allowed the user with Office 2003 to successfully open the file. This problem is also solved in this forum post although I didn't find it until I had a good idea of what was going on.

More detail: a different install of Office 2003 had no problems opening the file from the beginning. The problem file had originally been created and last modified using Office 2000 on a Windows 2000 PC.

Firefox image strangeness

After setting up my new Windows XP work laptop with Firefox (2.0.0.14) and all the other customizations I normally apply, I noticed that Firefox was no longer as robust as I used to remember. Freezing when opening PDFs, endless looping on some pages, and when opening images on their own, frequent messages to the effect of "[image name] cannot be displayed due to errors." After finally getting fed up with that last issue I went looking and found the solution- disable the Skype Firefox plugin. Apparently this plugin might be responsible for the other strangeness as well. This would go some distance towards restoring my faith in the stability of the application I use the most.