Bizarre colour problem in Excel SOLVED

[skylark53]

Several people use this computer, normally without problems. But I have just opened Excel after a month or so and suddenly the little boxes that appear when you float over things -- e.g. a data point on a graph -- are blank.

I have checked tools\options\chart and "show values" is ticked, as ever. The boxes themselves appear as they always have - but they are empty / plain white.

It's as if the colour table has been changed so that the (X,Y) values that must be in the box are written in white. But I can't find anyway of changing either the text colour or the box background colour.

Please help! It's driving me absolutely mad. I need to be able to see data values when I hover over them.

I should say that the rest of the graph looks absolutely normal - all the labels, lines etc are fine.

Thanks...

Edited July 11, 2009 by skylark53

[skylark53]

Solved.

It had nothing to do with Excel settings. It was something on the desktop setup.

Under Properties\Appearance\Advanced, the colours of the item "ToolTip" had been changed to be white-on-white, hence the text was invisible. I changed it to white-on-purple, figuring I'd spot that.

And I did - in an unexpected place. In my browser, Seamonkey, secure links (https://) took on the colours of ToolTips - whereas ordinary URLs remained the same. Well, well.

Anyway, it fixed the Excel problem - so Excel is using ToolTips to report the (X,Y) values of graphical points. As a side 'benefit' this may help to explain why it has proved impossible to switch off ToolTips, which I generally find extremely annoying - they are too widely used by MS, and too much would break if you were to turn them off.

I am going to post this under Windows XP as well, and hope the moderators will allow that, since this factoid seems most useful there.

Edited July 11, 2009 by skylark53