I saved a .xls file as a .ods. The .ods is very slow to load and reports ".. the document contains macros ... execution disabled due to security ... ". There were no macros in the .xls file and I don't want any. How do I find them and remove them?

Asked by Nic Knox

I am converting to Ubuntu from Microsoft. I saved a .xls file as a .ods. The .ods is very slow to load and reports ".. the document contains macros ... execution disabled due to security ... some functionality may be unavailable ".
There were no macros in the .xls file and I don't want any. How do I find them and remove the unwanted macros?
However there are quite a few cells containing calculations & IF etc functions. Also there is some Conditional Formatting.

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marcus aurelius (adbiz) said :
#1

Hi,

This is easy to fix. It seems that someone may have started the macro tool or visual basic editor. When this happens, excel will mark the spreadsheet as having a macro.

1) click Tools > Macro > Macros then select and delete all the macros that are there

2) click Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor

On the left panel, you'll see sheet1, sheet2, sheet3, etc. Click on each of these to open the pane on the right side. You may not see anything on the right pane, but drag and select everything then press delete. Repeat until you have gone through everything.

3) Save the file.

This will reset the sheet and you can open it in Calc without and problems.

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marcus aurelius (adbiz) said :
#2

Oh. If you don't have the latest openoffice version, you will want to update it. Version 3.2 fixes the sluggishness in opening and closing files.

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Nic Knox (baknox) said :
#3

I tried the fix suggested on 11/10/10 but my OOcalc did not give those options under Tools.
After some [a lot of!] prodding over the months I resolved the problem by going to:

Tools> Macros> Organise macros> Open Office basic ...> & deleted all the macros listed but that did not work.
Then I did Tools> Macros> Organise macros> looked at Python, Beanshell, but no Macros found there.
Finally I did Tools> Macros> Organise macros> Javascript ...> & deleted the 2 macros I found; that stopped the pop-up message appearing, but it was still slow to load.
I then found there were 2600 graphics objects embedded in the sheets, mostly called 'pixel' & a web address [but no visible hyperlink] presumably imported when I'd copied data from a website to create the sheet. It works much quicker now I've deleted them all [F5> Graphics> doubleclick on the item and hit 'delete']