Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!bbn.com!levin
From: levin@bbn.com (Joel B Levin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Word 4.0 and Excel 1.5
Message-ID: <41515@bbn.COM>
Date: 16 Jun 89 13:38:52 GMT
References: <12083@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
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Reply-To: levin@BBN.COM (Joel B Levin)
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Lines: 44

In article <12083@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> lchirica@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Laurian Chirica) writes:
|	- double-click on an Excel 1.5 spread sheet file;
|and get the message:
|       ----------------------------------------
|	The file "Microsoft Excel" could not
|	be opened/printed (-37)
|      -----------------------------------------

I have gotten this a lot in the past.  Usually by running Excel,
quitting, and running it again.  It may not have anything to do with
Word.  It was probably Excel 1.04 as well.  At the time I traced it to
the presence of Suitcase (either II or the old one), but I never
bothered Steve Brecher with it because it didn't seem worth it; trying
to start Excel again always worked.  MS products seem so fragile
because of the nonstandard things they do; I suspect that their way of
doing something was broken by the presence of the INIT rather than
that the INIT actually broke something in the system.

It happens a lot less lately, but I don't know why; maybe an upgrade
to Excel 1.5, or System 6.0.2, or Suitcase II ameliorated the problem
a little.  This is on a 2.5MB Plus and a 2.5MB SE.  
| 
|This is reproducible about 50% of the time.  On a couple of occasions
|I got a message saying that the memory was too fragmented to open 
|Excel.  The Finder said that the largest unused block was more than 3 Megs.

This is entirely Excel's (and Microsoft's) doing.  There is a
limitation in Excel which requires their code to run in one particular
megabyte of RAM (the low address end, I think).  If there is not a
large enough free block in that portion of RAM for Excel, you get the
"fragmented" message.  (Note that Excel always sits at the top of the
"About Finder" box with more recently launched programs going under
it.  This is because the Finder/Multifinder know that Excel is special
and has to get launched at "the other end" of memory.  Does anyone
know what flag or setting Excel has that tells the system to give it
this special treatment?)


	/JBL

=
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