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Sharepoint Edit in Datasheet locks or freezes Internet Explorer

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I ran into an interesting issue in Sharepoint 2007 last week that took me a few hours to solve and was not easy to debug.  I couldn't find any info on it anywhere so I thought this would be a good candidate for my first post to this blog.

One of my customers reported that when they tried to use the "Edit in Datasheet" view on any list in Sharepoint 2007 their computer would lock.  When I went to take a look at this I found IE was locked and it was consuming 50%+ processor time.  I also noticed that they were using a custom system master page which was the key to this problem.

After digging at the problem for an hour or so I found a margin style tag on the body tag of the master page. 

 

 <body onload="javascript_spBodyOnLoadWrapper();" style="background-color: #5f9fd7; margin: 10px 10px 10px 10px;">

  

Suspecting that this might be part of the issue I removed this piece from the body tag and removed the custom style sheets they had inserted as well. This did fix the issue but now all my styles were gone.  When I added the custom style sheets back in the problem came back.  Still suspecting the margin issue I looked for margin tags in the style sheets.  I found one in a class called footer which, you guessed it, was a margin for the bottom of the page.  After removing this style the Edit in Datasheet feature worked without a problem, and I still had my custom master page and styles.

So, if Edit in Datasheet isn't working for you or it is causing excessive processor usage from IE, and you are using a custom master page, check for margin tags and remove them.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 04, 2007
    PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2007/12/04/edit-in-datasheet-locks-or-freezes-internet-explorer/

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    I find that the datasheet view is probamatic.  For instance I have a look up field in a table and it works fine in the normal NEW, EDIT and DISPLAY forms, but in datasheet view it gives that custom lookup field a prefix of string;# .  No one including guys I know at Microsoft know what causes this.  My team just puts up with it hoping it is a bug.

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2008
    Any other Ideas on how to fix this problem? I went through the custom style sheet and removed all margin calls, to no avail. I then set the page to use the default.master and included the custom style sheets on that and it worked fine, so I think it's actually the custom master and not the style sheet. Any thoughts on where to look for the problem? Thanks for your time!!!

  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2008
    This should be one of the nicest features of SharePoint, it is very frustrating that it doesn't work. Instructions from Microsoft on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated

  • Anonymous
    October 01, 2008
    Margins wasn't the problem for me, it was a Spacer I put in the Footer of my page. Original code on how to customize my page was off of the net www.msftliveblogs.com "Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 - Custom Chrome/Branding" Not Working Code <tr><td class="my-spacer10"></td></tr> <tr><td class="my-footer">Copyright (C) 2008   Perrigo Internal Communications</td></tr> <tr><td class="my-spacer10"></td></tr> Working Code <tr><td class="my-footer">Copyright (C) 2008   Perrigo Internal Communications</td></tr> My-Spacer10 Class .my-spacer10 { height: 10px; }

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    Thanks for the suggestion. Why on earth would the margin tag make a difference? And any thoughts on why some might experience this issue and not others?

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2009
    BTW, I'd like to give credit to this blog post for finding the fix: http://tomblog.insomniacminds.com/2008/07/23/sharepoint-branding-issues-edit-in-datasheet-view/

  • Anonymous
    November 18, 2009
    Thanks for the suggestion, removing the doctype worked like a charm

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2010
    Your are a star!! you saved me hours of Hard work. thank you so much...

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2011
    I found setting a css max-height for the web part holding the list did the job.