Proteax for Spreadsheets - Release Notes

This page lists additional issues and documentation updates found since the launch of Proteax for Spreadsheets 1.4 2011-12-30. This page is a supplement to the release notes, not a replacement.

Below the issue list you will find an FAQ section.

Known issues from 1.3 2010-11 SP3 - still applicable

Date reported Issue Description Status
2011-02-06 Shared install is not operational for normal users until they login again. When an administrator has installed Proteax for Spreadsheets for "Everyone" the installation will not be operational immediately for users that are logged in. Even though the Proteax add-in shows up in Excel as soon as Excel is restarted, the add-in is not fully operational.

The reason for this is that the user's session isn't immediately notified about the new System Environment Variable defining the location of the Proteax software library. 		The installer broadcasts the System Environment Variable settings change but this only reaches the current user's session and does not reach other currently running sessions. There is no known simple workaround for this at the moment.

You can either instruct your end users that Proteax for Spreadsheets won't be operational until their next login or you can make them run the RefreshEnvVars.exe utility. Download the RefreshEnvVars.exe utility, unpack it using the password "bcf", and place it in a location accessible by all end users.

Known issues from 1.1 2010-01 - still applicable

Date reported Issue Description Status
2010-01-04 OpenOffice.org Calc - Live Preview may have unpredictable status upon opening sheet. When using the Live Preview feature in OpenOffice.org Calc you may experience that Live Preview will not turn on or that Live Preview is unexpectedly active. Apparently the cleanup code that was written to reset the Live Preview status when a sheet closes does not do what was intended. Workaround: The "Live Preview OFF" button always works. If "Live Preview ON" seems to have no effect, then use the OFF button first to forcefully reset Live Preview status to OFF, then turn it ON.
2009-11-27 Installer causes the Program Compatibility Assistant to issue a warning on Windows 7 64-bit. When installing Proteax for Spreadsheets for the first time on a 64-bit Windows 7 system you may experience the following dialog box from the Program Compatibility Assistant:

This seems to be caused by the fact that Proteax for Spreadsheets is a 32-bit application being installed on a 64-bit system. Installing the 32-bit version of Proteax is as-intended since even the 64-bit version of Office 2010 is actually using 32-bit Proteax. You can safely choose "This program installed correctly" to discard future warnings about the Proteax for Spreadsheets installer. 		It is still not clear when and why this happens as it does not always occur. Still under investigation.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Find solutions to configuration issues and get tips and tricks.


All documents are in PDF format

You need a PDF reader to read the documentation. A free reader can be downloaded from Adobe's download-site.


Where are all my Proteax files ?

You can browse the installed files by clicking the "Open Proteax For Spreadsheets home" link in the Proteax about box.


Molecule rendering

You need an external application capable of loading and displaying MDL molfiles before you can use the "View molecule" function. Below is a list of links to applications that have been tested with Proteax for Spreadsheets and are known to work.

  • MarvinSketch from ChemAxon - can be found here.
  • Symyx Draw from Symyx - can be found here.
  • ISIS/Draw from Symyx - can be found here.

Protein entry editing in GPMAW

The GPMAW application is widely used by the Mass Spectrometry community. The "New protein" and "Edit protein" functions assume that you have GPMAW installed in order to leverage the editing capabilities of GPMAW. If you do not have GPMAW installed you have two options to make the editing functions work:

  1. Purchase and install GPMAW from Lighthouse Data's web site.
  2. Associate a usable application, e.g. Notepad or Wordpad, with files having an ".SEQ" extension.
    If you need a .SEQ file example you can download one.
  3. Use the third option, which is to and describe what kind of editor capabilities you would like instead. All suggestions are welcome.

Molfile generation fails in spreadsheet ?

The =PROTEAX_AS_MOLFILE() formula fails with an "ERROR: String too large." when the protein sequence is longer than ca. 50-100 residues. The function generates an MDL molfile as a single string which can quickly exceed the cell length limits of your spreadsheet program.

OpenOffice.org Calc cannot handle strings larger than ~65000 characters and MS Excel (both 2003, 2007, and 2010) cannot handle strings larger than ~32000 characters (not even Office 2010 64-bit). Therefore Proteax for Spreadsheets will return "ERROR: String too large." when the result exceeds this limit. This seems to be a deliberate design limit of the current generation of spreadsheet programs.

Note that neither "View molecule" nor the SD file export are affected by this limitation. These functions operate on the molfile directly inside Proteax and never pass the molfile through a spreadsheet cell.