Excel embedded in Word

Old forum General discussion
1

I cannot open Excel sheets when they are embedded in Word.

I share documents with colleagues and use Excel sheets embedded in Word. Usually a click (or right click) opens Excel inside Word (or as Excel). Now I can’t open these embedded sheets. I get the issue regardless if I already have Excel open in the background.

Can you reproduce my problem? Any suggestion for workaround?

Thanks

(Win7, Office 2010, XL Toolbox 6.21)

2

Hi Morten,

I’m afraid it works on three different computers that I tried it on. All of these have Office 2010 installed. I tried both .docx and .doc files on Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit, and all of the time I was able to open the embedded Excel files just fine. I can see the usual Excel ribbon with the XL Toolbox commands.

What exactly is the error message that you get?

Daniel

3

Thanks for looking into this.

Word error sais:
The program used to create this object is Excel. That program is either not installed on your computer or it is not responding. To edit this object, install Excel or ensure that any dialog boxes in Excel are closed.
I can see XL Toolbox is loading so it did find Excel apparently.

Now that I try it again I can see it works if Excel + Toolbox is already open. However, once I get the error there is a hidden Excel.EXE still open in the Task Manager. If this failed Excel is open it will never work for me even if I open a new functional Excel.

I don’t know how to fix it but at least now I know how to work around.

4

Managed to get 20 € through to you using PayPall Guest service :slight_smile:

5

Thanks very much, I appreciate it!

I’ll keep an eye open for a solution to this. From what the error message says I can imagine that there is a dialog box shown by the hidden Excel which prevents Excel from doing anything else (e.g., opening the embedded spreadsheet) before the dialog box is closed. One would have to find a way to unhide the Excel window to see what the dialog box says.

6

I have tried turning XL Toolbox off. That solves the issue. So it is linked with opening Excel and Toolbox in the background. However, I have no idea how to find these hidden dialog boxes. Tell me if you have a tip on how to get behind this.

However, I found a workaround: I moved the Daniels XL Toolbox.xlam to the XLSTART folder. Then it cannot be turned on and off as an addin of cause…

7

You can batch-export all of the charts either automatically or programmatically. There’s a batch export feature built right into the Toolbox; look at “Export” -> “Batch export”.