Excel became very unstable after installation v4.0 (32bit) of ArcGIS for Office?

[WilliamWang]

This morning I installed v4.0 of the ArcGIS maps for office for an internal request. It seemed rather easy to use. However, after installing the extension to my 32 bit version office, I found my excel became unstable when I attempt to save or open. Basically, excel kept on crashing when I try to save a workbook. Or, when I open a file, an error message of "an error has occurred" would show up even though my workbook would open just fine.. However, as soon as I uninstalled the extension, all the problem goes away.

Is there something I should be aware of before installation? Please note I did follow the installation instruction.

I would love to play with this extension more if possible pending my excel does not become unusable. Thank you.

OS - window 7

Office - 2013 32bit

[ScottBall]

Does this happen in every workbook, or is there a specific workbook you use that you've noticed is problematic?

[WilliamWang]

Hi Scott, I tried 2 different workbook and got frustrated then stopped testing.

[ScottBall]

Thanks for sharing your feedback, William. I'll pass this info along to our dev team and we'll look into it. It usually is quite helpful if they can test using the workbook that caused problems - if it would be possible to get one of your workbooks that caused a problem, please email it to me at sball@esri.com. 

[AnkurNepalia]

Hi William,

I am a member of ArcGIS Maps for Office team. This morning Scott brought to our attention about this excel crash that you are seeing while working with ArcGIS Maps for Office 4.0. In order to debug this issue at our end, will it be possible to share some details about your machine and also some sample worksheet that you were using. I know from your previous comments that you have Windows 7 OS with Office 2013 (32 bit) installed.

Did you had Office 2010 also installed on this machine ?

Did you had any previous Maps for Office version (like 2.x or 3.x) installed on this machine ?

Do you have macros in your workbook that was crashing with ArcGIS Maps for Office 4.0 ?

Let me know if you have additional questions.

Thanks,

Ankur

[WilliamWang]

Good day Ankur,

Did you had Office 2010 also installed on this machine ?

• yes, my machine did have 2010 installed at one point, and it was changed to 2013 just over a year ago.

Did you had any previous Maps for Office version (like 2.x or 3.x) installed on this machine ?

• 4.0 version is my first attempt using ArcGIS maps for office

Do you have macros in your workbook that was crashing with ArcGIS Maps for Office 4.0 ?

• I do have macro in my personal workbook which was not enable at the time

A workbook I worked on soon after installation has been emailed to Scott. At the time, I was simply using open, copy, paste and save. Each time I saved, my excel would crash.

Hope this helps.

[AnkurNepalia]

Thanks for this information William. We got your spreadsheet and will troubleshoot further to see what is causing excel crash. We will update you soon about our findings.

Thanks.

[ScottBall]

Hi William - thanks again for providing the workbook to help us figure out what was going on. It appears to be an isolated case where something got corrupted within your workbook(s). We noticed that when our code requested a particular object within the workbook, Excel crashed. We tested this by writing a completely new app that only performed this one request - and again, Excel crashed. We were able to clean the corrupted object out of the workbook and it seems to be working just fine. We will provide this clean workbook back to you.

For the future, we are going to add some code to check for corrupted objects and handle them more gracefully. Our add-in ideally should not cause Excel to crash in any circumstance - so we are going to trap the error and provide a warning that we can't work with that particular workbook. Thanks so much for helping us find and fix this issue.