Detective
As it happens, our Data Detective had just returned to his London flat when he was contacted by someone asking what to do about QuickBooks crashing when he attempted to display columns for a particular Account QuickReport.
It seems the user was trying to look at the particulars for a specific account, and when he opened the QuickReport for that account, set the date range to all, and then tried to set the columns to month, QuickBooks would throw an Unrecoverable Error and shut down.
Since the QuickBooks user was just a few blocks from the Data Detective, he hailed a cab and proceeded to the user’s location. After cordial introductions, the Data Detective quickly assessed that the problem not only resided with the QuickReport, but the actual QuickBooks Account as well.
It seems that even when the Data Detective would attempt to open the account register, QuickBooks would throw an Unrecoverable Error and shut down.
It seems a little alarming that attempting to open the account register or producing a meaningful report on a specific account would result in an unrecoverable error. After running the Verify utility, QuickBooks reported it could find nothing wrong with the data.
Does this mean the problem was in the actual QuickBooks application rather than the data?
To test this hypothesis, our Data Detective closed the Company file having the problem and made a "Windows" copy of the entire directory containing the Company file and all associated files.
He then proceeded to reopen QuickBooks without launching a company file. To do this, he held down the Control (CTRL) key while double-clicking the QuickBooks icon.
From the No Company Open window, the Data Detective selected the option to Open a Sample File. After the Sample File opened, he could not only open the register of a similar type account, but he had to run a QuickReport for the same account, reset the date to all, and set columns by month without QuickBooks crashing.
This little bit of "data detecting" work implies that the most likely culprit is the actual QuickBooks Company file and not the QuickBooks application.
Returning to the actual QuickBooks Company file, the Data Detective knows that the Rebuild Data utility may be a useful tool when QuickBooks detects specific errors during Verify. He also knows that a Rebuild is not likely to repair the problem since Verify reported nothing wrong with the data.
But one simple trick of the trade has resolved similar problems in the past for Data Detective. He simply creates a brand new account of the same type as the erroneous account, calling it by the name ‘Repair’.
He then proceeds to edit the account that has been giving the user so many problems and begins the process of renaming that account to call it "Repair.
QuickBooks immediately pops up the message that an account with the same name already exists and asks if the accounts should be merged. The Data Detective responds in the affirmative, and QuickBooks merges the old troubled account with the newly created Repair account.
When the process is complete, the Data Detective is able to open the register of the new account and produce a QuickReport containing the entire account history with columns by month.
In other words, the new account is free of the problems that plagued the old account.
That leaves only one thing to do – edit the new account and change the name from "Repair" back to the original name of the account. Even with this edit, the account behaves normally in terms of register opening and QuickReporting.
Furthermore, the account balance perfectly matches the prior recorded balance.
It was a simple repair, despite the fact that it was a most worrisome problem. Our Data Detective has come to the rescue again.
Returning to his nearby flat, he plops down in his chair for a puff on his pipe and reviews the pile of letters from those in need of his assistance.