I use Excel spread sheets to make cut lists for our plant, and the last couple of months I have seen the same thing happening several times:

The sheets are set up to calculate part dimensions for doors. You punch in item number, amount, and overall dimensions, and the spread sheet will calculate the dimensions of all parts needed.

The problem is that the amount has been wrong numerous times, IMO too often to be just "operator error". There's no good way to go back to see what I really typed, but to me it seems like it on occasion goes back to "1", after I type "2". As a matter of fact, I have seen it change in another column as well, just happen to see that when I entered a number in one cell, it changed the number in a totally unrelated cell (i.e., there were no references whatsoever between the cells).

As it has happened so many times just lately, I hate to think that it's just me going senile, so I would like to know if anyone knows if there are any viruses that can do this. We discovered one or possibly several viruses in the network a week ago, and I don't know if it's really cleaned up yet.

Has anyone else had this problem, or do you know what can cause it?

Excel runs macros, just like Word. That's the type of virus that can infect either a spreadsheet or word doc. Google 'Excel virus' and see what you come up with. I don't have any experience with them but yes they do exist.

Not all macros are viruses. I write them all the time for work. You can set Excel to warn you before running macro's (which is the default). Settings are at Tools>Macro>Security.

I know quite a bit about Excel. If you would like me to take a look at the spreadsheet, just email it to me.

I have already searched Google and Altavista. I found that there are several macro viruses, but still haven't found any good descriptions of what they do. We will get a new server pretty soon, and our manager has promised to get a good virus protection this time. We really got burned when we bought the first one, the guy who set it up just barely knew the basics of networks and it seems like there was no virus protection or firewall whatsoever.

Gene, I haven't changed many of the default settings, but I'll check when I get back to the office. Are you saying that it would warn before running any macro, or can a micro virus run without warning? I'll e-mail one or two of the sheets If I can't find anything.

Thanks, guys!

Originally posted by Gene McGill:
Not all macros are viruses. I write them all the time for work. You can set Excel to warn you before running macro's (which is the default). Settings are at Tools>Macro>Security.

I know quite a bit about Excel. If you would like me to take a look at the spreadsheet, just email it to me. Gene,
Didn't mean to imply all macros are viruses just that is the method used to infect a spreadsheet or word doc. Macros are a feature that allow you to do some pretty neat stuff in word or excel, they're also a vulnerability if you don't have the right settings as you suggest.

Ok, it was set to "medium" security. I don't have any macros I want to run, so I changed it to "high". We'll see if that makes a difference.