Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 28, 2025)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Raffaele has macros in his Personal workbook. If he assigns these macros to buttons on the ribbon, after a while (a few hours up to a full day) the buttons disappear. The macros are still there; it is just the buttons that disappear from the ribbon. Raffaele wonders how he can prevent this.
It is entirely possible that your Personal workbook is being overwritten without your knowledge. This should only happen if you are connected to a network and someone else is responsible for your network, though it may happen if you have the Personal workbook stored on a "drive" that is actually in the cloud, such as with OneDrive or with Dropbox. In any of these situations, if someone else accesses your Personal workbook and that access results in it being overwritten, then your changes would be in danger.
It is also possible that your Personal workbook is corrupted in some way. The easiest way to figure this out is to locate, within Window and while Excel is shut down, the Personal workbook and rename it to something else. Then, restart Excel, add a macro or two, make your ribbon changes, and save those changes. Monitor your system for a couple of days and see if the problem crops up again.
Finally, you may want to check your macros to see if there is a scoping issue being manifest. If you assign a macro to the Quick Access Toolbar, you can indicate if the macro should be accessible from All Documents or just from the currently active workbook. If you give the change a limited scope, then you may believe that the change is not "holding," when in fact it is simply not visible in whatever workbook you may have open at the time.
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2021-04-11 21:15:01
Tomek
Alternatively, you can use export/import customizations, which is available under Customize the Ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar. For Excel the file created has a default name Excel Customizations.exportedUI and you can store it anywhere on your system.
I don't know if the result of this approach is equivalent to backing-up/restoring .officeUI files. If someone knows a difference please reply to this comment.
2021-04-10 07:01:53
Graham Rice
I have encountered this problem occasionally both in Excel and Word. I have never found the reason, but have been able to create a plan to recover from the situation. My Personal workbook is stored locally on my laptop, with no network or cloud connections.
Ribbon customization files are stored as Excel.officeUI, Word.officeUI, etc files in
C:\Users\User-Name\AppData\Local\Micrososft\Office
In some cases they may be stored like Excel16.officeUI, where "16" refers to Office 2019.
These customization files normally only exist AFTER you have customized a ribbon, they may not exist if you have never customized.
When the disappearance of the ribbon customizations occurs these xxx.officeUI files seem to become corrupted. It may be possible to determine from their "Date Modified" which event caused the problem.
Recovery Plan
==========
1) Create your customizations again, hopefully for the last time.
2) Go to C:\Users\User-Name\AppData\Local\Micrososft\Office
3) Take backup copies of all of the xxx.officeUI files. Store them in another partition or drive.
4) Next time that a customization disappears simple use a backup xxx.officeUI file to replace the corrupted file.
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