XL2000: Objects May Not Appear After You Copy a Worksheet

View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q211799

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Symptoms

When you copy a worksheet, the following problems may occur:

AutoShapes, drawing objects, charts, and other objects in the worksheet that do not appear, or that are represented by placeholders in the original worksheet, are displayed.

-or-
AutoShapes, drawing objects, charts, and other objects appear on one worksheet but not in another worksheet, even though they are present in the worksheet.

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Cause

These problems occur if the following conditions are true:

The worksheet that you are copying contains one or more embedded charts.

-and-
Either the Show placeholders or the Hide all option is selected. (To see these options, on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the View tab.)

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Workaround

To work around this problem, use the appropriate method to reset the Objects setting.

Method 1: Objects Are Displayed Normally

If objects appear normally, follow these steps:

On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the View tab.
Under Objects, click the setting that you want to use (for example, Show all, Show placeholders, or Hide all).
Click OK.

The change is applied to all of the worksheets in the workbook.

Method 2: Some Objects Are Not Displayed Normally

If some objects do not appear normally, follow these steps:

On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the View tab.
Under Objects, click Hide all, and then click OK.
On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the View tab.
Under Objects, click the setting that you want to use (for example, Show all, Show placeholders, or Hide all). Click OK.

The change is applied to all of the worksheets in the workbook.

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Status

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

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More information

You can copy a worksheet by using the following steps:

Click the worksheet that you want to copy. On the Edit menu, click Move or Copy Sheet. Or, right-click the sheet tab of the particular worksheet that you want to copy, and then click Move or Copy on the shortcut menu.
In the Move or Copy dialog box, click to select the Create a copy check box. In the To book list, select a destination workbook for the copied worksheet. Specify the destination location for the copied worksheet in the Before sheet list.
Click OK.

The three possible settings for objects in worksheets in Microsoft Excel are listed in the following table:


   Setting             Definition
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Show All            All objects are displayed normally.

   Show Placeholders   Objects are displayed in gray; you can see the
                       shape of the object but not its contents.

   Hide All            Objects are not displayed.

All worksheets in a workbook use the same settings. You can change these settings for the active workbook by clicking Options on the Tools menu, and then clicking the View tab.

If you copy a worksheet, the Objects setting for the destination workbook is automatically reset to Show all, regardless of its previous setting.

In addition, if the setting of the copied worksheet is Hide all, and if you subsequently copy that worksheet to a new worksheet in a single workbook, objects in the original worksheet may not be visible even though the setting for the workbook is Show all. If this behavior occurs, use the second method in this article to restore the objects on the worksheet to the normal behavior.

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