Word 2010 - Cannot edit embedded excel tables after closing document

Anonymous
2010-09-07T12:14:32+00:00

Hi folks

I recently upgraded from Office 2007 to Office 2010. My system is a acer 6593 laptop running Windows 7 Professional with 4GB ram (3GB usable by windows)

I have an issue with Word 2010 and embedded excel tables. I am able to create a word document and insert the excel table therein (using insert-> table -> excel speadsheet). I am also able to edit the table onc created, and manipulate it. However, as soon as I save and close the word document, I am no longer able to edit (or convert for that matter) the excel object.

The error message given is "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 have tried to completely repair and un-install office 2010, as well as running a cleanup tool to ensure the un-install was completely removed.

The created word document excel tables are editable in other people office 2007 installations. (there is no-one esle with office 2010 for me to try). so I am unsure whether it an issue with my specific office instalation or office 2010 in general.

As I say, the office 2007 trick of converting to a excel binary file does not work, giving an error massage*"the server application, source file, or item cannot be found. make sure the application is properly installed, and that is has not been deleted, moved, renamed, or blocked by policy".*

Also, although I cannot edit existing excel tables, I am able to add new ones to the word document and edit them, again until I save and close.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2011-07-17T22:42:35+00:00

I was experiencing this issue in Word 2010.

I was able to fix it by disabling all COM Add-ins in Excel 2010. I only had the one add-in, another system on our network had multiple add-ins. (for instructions on disabling the add-ins see below)

Close word, and open a blank Excel worksheet. In Excel go to file>options>add-ins. Then down the bottom select COM Add-ins from the drop down menu and hit go. Uncheck everything hit ok. Close the options menu close Excel. Now open your word document and try to edit your embedded files. They should now work without a problem.

I make no promises, but this worked for me :)

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-07-29T13:40:47+00:00

    Mmmm, one last thing to look at: If you right-click the excel object, after opening the document, do you see a command for the Excel object listed in the Context menu? If yes, can you use Open in the sub-menu off that command?

    Cindy Meister, VSTO/Word MVP

    Thanks for the last point, it seems to have cleared up my problem.  Strange thing is, I received a big Word doc from a client with dozens of embedded Excel worksheets.  I have 2 computers which I thought were identical, running Windows 10 with Office 365.  One would open the embedded Excel worksheets no problem, the other produced this error message.

    Trying out your suggestion of right clicking on the embedded worksheet, I found that on the computer that works, right clicking gives the options Edit - Open - Convert.  On the one that didn't work, the only option was Convert.  Choosing Convert and then choosing Microsoft Excel Worksheet seems to have fixed the problem.  Can't figure out why, though.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-08-21T16:13:41+00:00

    A lot of times, this is an issue with the file ext.  The new versions of Office dont always play nice with the older versions when converting the docs.

    If you were sent the document from someone else it's likely the document is an older version and the fix is changing the Filename.Docx.  Rename the document and remove the x.  This will convert the document to the original document type (word 97-2003) and allow you to edit the embedded items within the document.  

    If it is a document that was created with a 2010+  The suggestion of disabling the add-ins will likely be the key.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-07-05T17:54:18+00:00

    Disabling Com add ons worked for me

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-02-04T22:34:59+00:00

    We found that changing the document extension to a ".zip" and looking in the "Word" > "embeded" folder would often get you access to the spreadsheet so that you can at least re-embed it into the document and edit it again. 

    This helped me.  I had an old Word document from 2007 with an couple embedded PowerPoint figures.  The Word document had a .doc extension.  I found that I was able to save the file as a .docx and then change the file extension to .zip and extract the contents.  I was able to find the embedded PowerPoint presentations under the "word\embeddings" folder, but unfortunately, PowerPoint said that it couldn't open one of the files, possibly because it was not a PowerPoint file or that it has become corrupted.

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