Run Excel with user's folder on another drive

Nov 01, '02 08:38:53AM

Contributed by: harald_r

If you put your User folder on a different partition under OS X, you get problems using Excel v.X. You'll see a message like "VBA English/Standard (VBAEN.OLB) object library not found" during launch, and after the workbook is open, you cannot record a macro. If you try to click "Disable Macros," Microsoft Excel quits unexpectedly.

Microsoft confirms this misbehaviour in their Knowledge Base article number Q322237. They recommend that you "Move the Users folder back to the hard disk partition that contains Mac OS X -or- reformat your hard disk to have a single partition!"

However, after some searching the net, I found this workaround by Brad Hutchings that resolves the issue without reorganising your whole system. I tried this, it works flawlessly so far. Here is Brad's hint as posted in microsoft.public.mac.office.excel:

At least in my setup, Excel seems to have problems with my home directory being on a different disk partition than the root OSX partition. I found this out by creating a temporary user with a home directory on the OSX partition and found that this user could run Excel with no problems.

So, here is what I did. I took the Carbon Registration Database file that Is created the first time you run any Office X program and deleted it from my home directory (it is in ~/Library -> Preferences -> Microsoft). I then copied the Carbon Registration Database file from the temporary user directory. I have been running this way for several days with no problems. Make sure you are not running any Office programs when you do this. YMMV, no doubt.
[Editor's note: I have not tested this myself.]

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