Excel Crashing On Exit & How To Turn Off GETPIVOTDATA

March 5th, 2008 | View Comments

Issue #1: mso.dll forces Excel to crash on exit

Recently, my Excel 2003 installation crashed on exit 90% of the time with the following message:

Faulting application excel.exe, version 11.0.8169.0, stamp 465f27bd, faulting module mso.dll, version 11.0.8172.0, stamp 46771b00, debug? 0, fault address 0x0003f458.

I googled desperately for a patch/workaround/hint, but found nothing. Then, I thought: “What if I just deleted the mso.dll (–> C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE11\mso.dll)? Excel should then re-install it, right?” And it did – no more such crashes. I visited the office update site, but no update was needed.

Issue #2: Excel replaces a simple cell link formula with GETPIVOTDATA

How to solve this issue is described here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287736/

I use the Auto_Open macro sub Auto_Open() in my PERSONL.XLS to switch this automatic behaviour off.

[Update from 2009-06-19]

In Excel 2007, you can turn off GetPivotData within the general Excel options (under “Formulas”) as well as within the worksheet (be sure to have the cursor in the PivotTable -> Options -> PivotTable-Group -> Options -> clear the “Generate GetPivotData” check box). Thanks to kostas.