EDIT (next day): I think something may have been going on at Google, as this morning the behavior has changed. On Desktop I can now open the sheet up, and occasionally, with no pattern that I can yet detect, I get part of the previous error... but now I can dismiss it, and things continue to work as far as I can tell. At least now I know if it craps out I can still get to it from my phone, collapse all rows, and then it starts behaving again. But so weird.
EDIT 2 (few hours later): Nope, something is still seriously wrong. Any time I expand or collapse rows in my pivot table, something beneath the surface goes wrong and it's only a matter of time before formulas begin miscomputing, and eventually I get the "reload" error loop again. To me this feels like some sort of issue on Google's side, but I have no idea how to actually demonstrate that conclusively. But as it stands now, I still can't really get any meaningful work done with this sheet.
Possibly the strangest and most confounding issue I've ever run into with Google sheets, has just begun today.
I have a spreadsheet I've been building for a couple of months now. I work in it basically every weekday. Last time was Friday. I went into it today on my Windows machine using the latest Google Chrome, as I normally do, and added some more data to it. Then I went to my summary pivot table and tried to expand the new row (for this week) that had been generated by the new data I had added to the source sheet.
Suddenly I was greeted with a popup saying "Unable to load file. Try to load it again or send an error report.". From that point on the sheet was unloadable, completely. As if had just spontaneously self-destructed. I tried every troubleshooting step I could think of or find on the web including:
- Incognito Mode
- Clearing Cache
- Force Refresh
- Make a copy of the document
- Share the document to another account and open it there
- Try from another browser (Firefox)
- Toggle online/offline mode
- Try from a different computer (Mac using Chrome)
I got absolutely nowhere, same issue every time. I couldn't even get to the version history list because the error would come up before I could get to the menu. But once (and only once) I managed to interrupt the loading at the exact right moment, and was able to load an older version of the file (From Thursday) instead. It loaded perfectly fine! All seemed good. Until again... I added some more data and tried to open the new pivot table row again. BOOM right back to the same place.
But here's where things take a turn for the weird. I thought that I just might get lucky and be able to access and save the sheet from my iPhone which has Google Drive on it. Sure enough I could open the document, and it gave me no grief at all! Can see everything, open & close the various pivot rows, etc. All seems fine. Then I went back to my desktop, reloaded, and voila! The sheet suddenly loaded fine. Again, until I tried to open a pivot table row... at which point, same error all over again.
However, I noticed that on my phone, I could now see the expanded row just fine, so I tried collapsing it on the phone, and reloading on Desktop. Once again, the sheet loaded just fine.
So whatever is going on, appears to be connected to the pivot table, specifically expanding ANY row. If a row is expanded, the sheet will never load on a desktop computer. But it will work just fine on iOS.
I'm mystified as to what could be going on. This sheet has never given me problems, until now. It's a critical sheet to my work and I've put a good chunk of effort into the pivot tables and formatting. I would be most upset if I were to lose it. At the moment it seems the sheet is in fact intact and fine, since the phone can access it. But...
How do I fix this so my sheet works normally again on a Desktop browser?