I have one of those nasty jobs that involves taking things written in depths of antiquity (well, last touched 10 years ago, written in 2000) and trying to get them functional on a new machine. The things being a cobbled together system of Applescript and Excel, including several Excel 4 Macros. I am trying to take this creaking device (known to work fine using Excel 2011 on Snow Leopard) and get it working with Excel 2011 on Mavericks. So the problems are with the transition from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, not with the Excel version. (I will try a Yosemite upgrade just in case this is a known Mavericks bug)
I have two problems.
One is that sometimes, a worksheet is opened and activated, but the script stalls unless (the worksheet is left as a plain white sheet, not even the normal grid lines visible) unless I manually interact with it in some way (all I need to do is just click on it). This is just straight Applescripts, admittedly perhaps using an old idiom for file opening, but as I said, works perfectly on earlier systems. This does not happen when I step through the script in Script Debugger/Applescript Editor, only when I run it normally.
The second problem also only happens when I run it through normally, but not when I step through in Script Debugger - at one point in the middle of an old Excel 4 Macro (using the ‘run XLM Macro’ command), it halts and beachballs for some minutes. It does this immediately after receiving input from a user form. But it does NOT do this if I am stepping through in the Debugger! Or when run on an earlier OS. So it is not a problem with the script per se, but something dependent on how it is called, presumably related to the previous issue. Any suggestions?
I know the ‘right’ way to deal with the second issue is probably to rewrite the Macro in VBA, but I’m reluctant to do this, especially if I am not sure if it will solve the problem.