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HomeTroubleshootingAll Products: Other Issues@RISK Ribbon Grayed Out

3.31. @RISK Ribbon Grayed Out

Applies to:
@RISK 5.x–7.x
TopRank 5.x–7.x
BigPicture 1.x/7.x

Something happened, and now my @RISK (TopRank, BigPicture) tab on the Excel ribbon is grayed out. The other Excel ribbons seem normal.

(The Results section of the @RISK ribbon is normally grayed out until you've run a simulation. This article is about the situation where almost the whole @RISK, TopRank, or BigPicture ribbon is grayed out.)

Short answer: Click Help » About @RISK (TopRank, BigPicture), and the ribbon will be restored.

Details: This can happen in Excel 2007 or later, and it's due to a bug in Excel's handling of dynamic ribbons. Therefore, it affects @RISK, TopRank, and BigPicture, which have dynamic ribbons, but not the other Palisade products, which don't.

The basic issue is that dynamic ribbons can't be updated while you're in edit mode, with "Edit" showing in the status bar at the bottom of the Excel window. (You get into edit mode by clicking into a cell and typing, or by clicking into the formula bar, among other ways.) But not all operations are prohibited in edit mode. If you do something that should cause the @RISK ribbon to change, Excel actually goes into an indeterminate state and almost all of the @RISK ribbon is gray.

There's a "rescue" built into @RISK, TopRank, and BigPicture as a way around this problem: click the product's Help icon and then select any of the Help menu items. That will cause the ribbon to reset.

Last edited: 2015-10-07

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