Jtdylktuy

I'm having an issue with a spreadsheet in Excel 2010 where I'm experiencing that the form controls sometimes change position and/or size. This happens even though the controls are "Locked" and the sheet is protected with a password, so it shouldn't be the users that move them around.

Examples:

Here have the buttons moved and their size have changed slightly

Here the comboboxes have move and the cursor changes when I try to select the control - it's disabled and I can't select a different item. Also notice that the letter "W" in the combobox to the right is upside down. The comboboxes are set to "Move but don't size with cells".

I've tried to open such document in both Excel 2010 SP0 (RTM), SP1 and SP2 along with Excel 2013 and they all show the same thing, but I have a feeling that once this has happened, it doesn't really matter where you open it.

The users are unable to tell me what they do to make this happen which only makes it harder to troubleshoot.

Please note that the controls are "Form Controls" and not "ActiveX Controls", so http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2503335 is not the solution (even tried it out of desperation ;))

Anyone experienced the same thing and have a solution?

Thanks in advance.

Likely cause is that someone inserted rows or columns. The position of the form controls are not bound to the cell but to the worksheet, and the controls stay in their place, but the worksheet itself changes.

It should be possible to link the controls to cells the same way you can do it with images.

Try grouping the controls. The group seems to force excel to use the original sizes and positions.

I know you stated these are Form controls, not ActiveX controls, but the erroneous behavior and apparent dependence on the zoom setting is identical to problems I've seen with ActiveX controls in Excel 2010 (only), so the underlying problem may actually be related.

With ActiveX option-buttons and checkboxes, if you go into page-break preview view or print (multiple) sheets that contain such controls to certain make/model types of printer, when the zoom setting of any page is not 100%, the controls on that page can get moved as a result. The only workaround I know of is to first set each page's zoom value to 100%, do the page-break preview and/or print operations, and then restore the zoom to whatever it was.

If those operations are performed by VBA code, then it's a pretty straightforward thing to save/set/restore the zoom setting, but note that Zoom is actually a Window property, so you have to activate each sheet in order to get/change its zoom setting.