The most likely reason for this is that you need to adjust your macro security settings:

• Click the File tab (or Office Button) in Excel, then click Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings, Add-Ins.
• If there is a tick in the first or the third of the three checkboxes under this category, deselect the ticked option, and then click OK.
• Close and re-start Excel, and Rainbow Analyst should load and run as normal.

If you work for a large organisation, and after installing Rainbow Analyst on your work computer you find that there is simply no sign of the Rainbow tab in Excel, then the problem may well be with the Microsoft Group Policy settings for Office 2016 or Excel 2016 that have been applied by your IT administrator. The settings most likely to be involved are the following, which together ensure that only certain specified (“managed”) Excel add-ins can be installed:

• Block all unmanaged add-ins
• List of managed add-ins

But there are also a number of other Group Policy settings which can prevent Rainbow from running, including:

• Disable UI extending from documents and templates
• Turn off all user customizations
• Disable VBA for Office applications

If it seems likely that Group Policy settings may be the problem, you will need to check with your IT administrator whether they are using any of the settings listed above.

Following a July 2016 Microsoft Office Security Update, you may need to “unblock” the Rainbow add-in file. To do this, first locate the add-in file RainbowPro.xlam in your add-ins folder as explained on our Installation page.

Then right-click the file in File Explorer (Windows Explorer) and click Properties. At the bottom of the General tab you should see a Security section; check (tick) the box marked Unblock.

Click OK, then close and re-start Excel, and Rainbow Analyst should load and run as normal.

The message box asking you to “Click OK to activate Rainbow Analyst” was introduced in Rainbow version 12.4, and it allows Excel to complete the final stage in the new (Windows Installer) process for installing Rainbow.

Normally this message box will only be displayed once (to complete installation). However, if you were unable to complete installing the current version of Rainbow, and you went back to an earlier version (before 12.4), this message box might continue to pop up every time you start Excel.

You can stop this happening by installing a current version of Rainbow, or you can disable it manually in either of two ways:

(1) In registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\RainbowAnalyst you can change the value of RunInstall from 1 to 0 (zero).

(2) Or in folder Users\[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART you can delete the file AddRainbowPro.xlam.

Rainbow temporarily hides the scroll bars while functions are running in order to speed up processing, and very occasionally (for instance if Excel crashes) the scroll bars may be left in this hidden state. You can restore them in your Excel Options (click File, Options, Advanced), but it’s much quicker just to go to the Rainbow tab, click Summary Report (or any of Rainbow’s main functions), then click Cancel.

This is because certain other software does not properly acknowledge password-protected VBA project files like the Rainbow Analyst add-in file. In particular this problem can be caused by:

• Google Desktop, or
• certain COM add-ins for Excel, e.g. WinDIP or the Adobe Acrobat add-in.

The best solution is to find and deactivate the relevant software; you may need to try deactivating or uninstalling several software items until you find which one is causing the problem.

You can view and manage your COM add-ins if you click the File tab and then Options and Add-Ins, then at the bottom of the dialog box select (Manage) COM Add-Ins and click Go. If for instance you then find that the WindDIP add-in is active, you can uncheck the checkbox to deactivate it, or click Remove to uninstall it, then click OK. You may then need to reboot your PC, and you should find that this has resolved the problem.

If for some reason you are unable to identify or deactivate the software that is causing the problem, you could try one or both of the following:

• In the Rainbow Password dialog box, click Cancel and/or press the Esc key repeatedly until the password box disappears.
• Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and start Task Manager, then under the Processes tab look for a process named EXCEL.EXE (i.e. an instance of Excel running in the background). Click on this, then click End Process and follow the prompts to close this instance of Excel.

Every Excel workbook is saved with a calculation setting; this can be Automatic, Automatic except for data tables, or Manual, and you can find it if you click the File tab (or Microsoft Office button), then Options, then Formulas. Excel can only have one calculation setting (even when more than one workbook is open), so in general it uses the calculation setting of the first workbook that you open. Normally Rainbow Analyst doesn’t affect this setting, even though there is a Rainbow Analyst workbook that forms part of the Rainbow add-in file.

However, versions of Rainbow up to 7.2 sometimes automatically re-saved the Rainbow add-in file when you first opened it, as a “housekeeping” process to clear out data left over from the previous session. When this happened, Excel applied the calculation setting from the Rainbow add-in file as if it were the first opened workbook, and if Rainbow was saved with Manual calculation, then Excel used Manual calculation even if you subsequently opened a workbook which was saved with the calculation set as Automatic.

To avoid this problem, later versions of Rainbow up to 12.0 deliberately set the calculation mode to Automatic on startup, but this resulted in the opposite problem for users who then opened a workbook which had been saved with Manual calculation. And so from version 12.1 onward Rainbow does not change the calculation mode; this will be set as normal according to the first workbook that you open. But if you still wish to have it set to Automatic by Rainbow, you can simply click Preferences and select the relevant option.

To uninstall Rainbow version 12.4 or later, open Windows Settings, click Apps, scroll down and click Rainbow Analyst, then click Uninstall.

To uninstall Rainbow versions 10 to 12.3, click Preferences (or Menu Settings in version 10) on the Rainbow tab, then click Uninstall.

To uninstall earlier versions of Rainbow, you can delete the Rainbow add-in file from your Excel add-ins folder. If you are not sure which is your Excel add-ins folder, see the notes on our Download page. But you don’t need to delete the file; you can simply deactivate Rainbow in the list of your Excel add-ins (again see our Download page for more details).

After uninstalling Rainbow, when you next start Excel you may get a message “Sorry, we couldn’t find C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\AddIns\RainbowPro.xlam”. To stop this message appearing, just click File, Options, Add-ins, Go, then deselect the RainbowPro add-in and click Yes to remove it from the add-ins list.