XL97: Illegal Operation Unhiding a Row with a Macro

When you run a Visual Basic for Applications macro in Microsoft Excel 97, if the macro contains a command that unhides a row in a worksheet, you may receive the following error message: If you click Details, you receive the following error message:

This problem may occur when the worksheet contains a very large number of hidden rows (usually, greater than 32768 rows) and you attempt to unhide a row by setting the Hidden property of the row to False. The following is an example of code that may cause the macro to fail:

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If you have limited programming experience, you may want to contact a Microsoft Certified Partner or Microsoft Advisory Services. For more information, visit these Microsoft Web sites:

Microsoft Certified Partners - https://partner.microsoft.com/global/30000104 (https://partner.microsoft.com/global/30000104)

Microsoft Advisory Services - http://support.microsoft.com/gp/advisoryservice (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/advisoryservice)

For more information about the support options that are available and about how to contact Microsoft, visit the following Microsoft Web site:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;CNTACTMS (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;cntactms) To prevent this problem from occurring, do not set the Hidden property of an entire row to False if a very large number of rows are hidden in the worksheet. Instead, set the RowHeight property of the row equal to an appropriate value. For example, to set the height of a hidden row to 12, use the following line of code: Alternatively, use the following line of code: This code sets the height of the hidden row equal to the height of the row immediately above it.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

You can use the Hidden property whenever you want to hide or unhide an entire row or column in a worksheet. For example, to hide the row that contains the active cell, use the following line of code: To unhide a hidden row, set the Hidden property for that row to False. To do this, use the following line of code: This line of code may fail if more than half of the rows in the worksheet are hidden.