Excel automation

[Kathy001]

Hi,

I installed office 2013 on my windows 7 64bit portable.
Now, excel automation is not working. With office 2010 there were no problems.

oExcelObject = CREATEOBJECT('Excel.Application')

this is the error i get : OLE error code 0x8008005: unknown COM status code

Can anyone give me some advice. Thanks !!!

K

 

[DSummZZZ]

That error appears to be coming from the COM server itself. You may have to tweak your firewall, anti-virus or Excel configuration to allow the instance to be created by a foreign or external app such as VFP.
There are settings in Office 2013 that weren't around in say, 2010.


-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[TamarGranor]

Which version? To automate, you need 32-bit Office.

Tamar

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Really 32 bit? With Office 2010 64bit is not the problem. Vice versa you can't use VFP OLEDB from Office 64bit, but you can automate excel from VFP. Isn't it about the flavor of Office 2013 you install? Full installation vs. some other flavor, eg "Click-To-Run"?

In the end it makes sense to install 32bit Office, also see

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ee681792.aspx

"32 bit Office is recommended for most users"

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Koen Piller]

Hi,

I encounter, more or less, the same but with WIN8.1 and Office 2010 or

 

[Koen Piller]

Hi,

I encounter, more or less, the same with WIN8.1 and Office 2010 or WSIN8.1 and InternetOffice 11, in both situations a VFP application working OK with WIN7 now errors with OLE error code 0x8004005: unspecified error (translation by me from my Dutch OS)

Regards,

Jockey(2)

 

[Kathy001]

Hi,

Thanks for helping !!
I installed Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013, the 32bit version.
The full installation.

Are there any options that may to be switched on or off?

Appreciating your help.

Regards

Kathy

 

[mm0000]

No experience with VFP on Window 8.1, but could it be a rights issue? Could you run VFP as administrator and try again?.

 

[Kathy001]

Thanks mm0000

But i am working on my own pc with administrator rights. Not windows 8 but windows 7.

Regards

 

[DSummZZZ]

As I mentioned earlier, you may have to tweak Excel. Take a look at the "Trust Center" in Excel itself (File->Help). There are all sorts of settings in that thing you can check. I had to fiddle with it to get it to work right.


-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[TamarGranor]

@Olaf, my understanding is that you can't automate the 64-bit version of Office from VFP, but I haven't tried it. So if your experience differs, that's good to know.

Tamar

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Tamar,

as Kathy already said she installed the 32bit version all that won't matter much for her, also I don't have Office2013, only 2010.

But as it's new to you, indeed I have the 64bit Office installed, starting eg Excel 2010 an info screen shows it's 64bit. I can still automate it. That's not very surprising, the OLE classes are embedded in an EXE, therefore Excel.Application starts a new process, it's an out-of-process COM server (EXE), not an in-process COM Server (DLL), and you can start any EXE from VFP, no matter it 32bit or 64bit.

I have these folders
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14 -> Main install with all the application EXEs, 64bit.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12 -> mainly one file: STSLIST.DLL, also STSLISTI.DLL and CHM (The CHM shows it's about Access Web Datasheet)
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14 -> more DLLs, but no EXE.

I think the x86 folders contain only some 32bit help DLLs, or are from the readonly viewers I had installed earlier.

The problem with 64bit is inverse, Office 64bit can't see and use 32bit ODBC drivers or OLEDB providers. But that's not a problem for me.

There still is no very good reason to install Office as 64 bit application. You don't gain much, the technet link above tells us Excel files are allowed to grow over 2GB, but that won't help you in conjunction with VFP. Word processing also does not get more stable with 2GB or larger docx files.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Kathy001]

Hi,

I want to thank all of you !!
I tried to look at the options in the trust center, like Dave mentioned (thank you for that), but it is still not working.

Thank you Olaf for your information. I have 3 folders, Office12, Office14 and Office15. The last one contains Office 2013. In Office14, the excel exe is still there. I tried to click on it, but i got the message that Excel was failed to start last run and if i want to start Excel in save mode. After clicking "Yes", nothing is happening.

I think it would be better to uninstall the complete Office and reinstall it. Then, we will see.

I would like to thank everyone !!

Regards
Kathy

 

[RobSpencer]

This isn't going to be much help...

I'm running VFP 9 SP2 on Windows 8.1 (64bit) with Excel 2013 (64bit) and while I don't have any full Excel automation code to test, I can certainly create the Excel application object and access properties, etc. It doesn't bring up an obvious window until you set the application to be visible but it does work.

Rob Spencer
Caliptor Pty Ltd

http://www.caliptor.com.au/

 

[mikeopolo]

I also had issues with automation code not working at all with Office 2013, so I installed Office 2010 (Excel only) to a separate Office folder, then uninstalled it (Office 2010 that is), now the code is working once more .

Regards
Mike

 

[Kathy001]

Thanks, Mike, for your info !

The uninstallation did not help, like Rod said. But, i had to try.

I will try Mike's suggestion.

Thanks to all

Regards
Kathy

 

[TamarGranor]

@Kathy001, are you sure that you have Excel actually installed on the machine, as opposed to a version that's reaching out to the cloud as needed?

Tamar

 

[ljzagorac]

VFP 9 SP2 on Windows 8.1 (64bit) with Excel 2013 (64bit) NO problems at all.
Security center must be tweaked.

 

[KevinRHunt]

ljzagorac

I'm trying to do Office Automation with VFP 9 SP2 and communicating with Word 2013 and I'm getting an error of "Could not find installable ISAM"

I have the VFP ODBC drivers loaded and the automation works fine from Word 97 up through Word 2010, but 2013 is causing the above error.

I downloaded the Access ODBC drivers that were referenced when I searched for the above error message and that allowed me to clear the message and complete the merge, but that's not a very elegant approach, getting stopped every time saying "Could not find installable ISAM".

Interestingly enough, without making any changes to Excel, that automation works fine, probably because I'm programmatically populating the spreadsheet versus supplying a table to Word that serves as the data to be merged into the template.

Could you tell me what tweaks you made in the Security Center to get it to work?

Thanks, I have a number of clients that are dead in the water since they've upgraded.

Kevin

 

[KevinRHunt]

I forgot to add that the version of Office 2013 is the 64 bit version.

The automation starts and before I get the Word icon in the bottom tray, I get an error message saying:
Error Occurred. Could not find installable ISAM.

The only option is to click OK

After I had installed the Access ODBC drivers as I indicated in the previous message, when I clicked OK, it got another message indicating Data Link Properties.

It's on the second tab entitled Connection, and regardless of whether I clicked OK or Cancel, I'm then brought into Word and the merge is completed.

It's this process of clearing the two intermediate messages that I'd like to get resolved.

I've gone through a number of the different options in Word and turned on/off one by one various options that I thought may have an impact and nothing proved to be the winning combination.

Again, thanks for any help ...

Kevin