Excel online displays a white box that cannot be removed

Question

Our organisation recently moved from Google Apps to Office 365. Most of our spreadsheets now display a large white box over the spreadsheet that cannot be removed when viewing or editing these Excel files online.

A error message Excel can't download this shape is displayed along with a broken image icon.

The shape in question is not visible when editing the spreadsheet in Excel.

Solution 1

These invisible shapes can be removed by editing the file in Excel and then selecting and deleting all shapes from each worksheets:

1. Click F5 or Ctrl+G to display Go To dialog and click Special...
2. Check Objects, and then click Ok to select all objects in the sheet.
3. Hit Backspace to remove all autoshapes selected from the sheet.
4. Do the same for each sheet in your file.

If some wanted shapes are selected, press the CTRL key and click the ones you want to keep to deselect them.

To programmatically delete all autoshapes, add a VBA module and call/run this new procedure:

Sub DeleteShapes()
    Dim Shp As Shape
    For Each Shp In ActiveSheet.Shapes
       Shp.Delete
    Next
End Sub

Reference: https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/714-excel-delete-all-auto-shapes.html

Solution 2

I have verified the same behaviour with my own Excel files, when opening them in O365 Excel online.

My experimenting shows that legacy desktop Excel comment shapes are not supported. I had no shapes added by myself, but I did have comments. The legacy comments have been presented with yellowish popup rectangle, like "post-it" notes.

Adding a comment in O365 Excel results in visually different comment, no "post-it" popup. The comments are listed in side panel (not opened by default). The code for the comment object within the downloaded XLSX file is also slightly different.

Unfortunately I don't have a solution for removing the original comment shapes or converting them as O365 compatible.