Microsoft Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action.

Anonymous
2010-07-07T05:03:49+00:00

I am testing Excel 2010 on a few Windows 7 pc.  2 of them somethings get the following error after saving a file.  Click ok and then it appears after 10 seconds. It just keep going on until I kill the excel process.  Please assist.

"Microsoft Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action."

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2010-07-07T05:24:34+00:00

Hi,

You could try choosing File, Options, Advanced, and under General check Ignore other applications that use DDE.

If this answer solves your problem, please check, Mark as Answered. If this answer helps, please click the Vote as Helpful button. Cheers Shane Devenshire

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-03-05T20:51:30+00:00

    I am happy that resolved your issue - When some of our users received the error they had nothing open but Outlook and Excel, we even had them run the reports prior to open Outlook and still received the error message - Since I made the changes above we have not had this issue.

    Thank you

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  2. Anonymous
    2012-03-05T20:42:00+00:00

    Windows 7;Excel 2010; the problem occurred when I tried to embed a pdf into a worksheet.

    I thought about following a suggestion I read somewhere else -- cancel the excel.exe process -- but I didn't want to go through the hassle of probably losing recent changes, and had a number of workbook open at the time. So, while I was in the process monitor anyway, I browsed through the list of processes to see if I could find anything that might be the bottleneck. I noticed two instances of acrord32.exe, which I guess had something to do with reading pdf files..( I did indeed have 4 pdf's open in the (free) adobe reader.) So I cancelled both of those processes and the lock freed up immediately.

    Hope this helps someone.

    Phil

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  3. Anonymous
    2012-03-01T16:04:49+00:00

    I have found a few tricks that seem to have worked for us for a couple weeks now - One is with Excel open, open Task Manager and right click on the Excel Process, change to High Priority, exit and re-open Excel, 2 is to remove Live Essentials from Programs and Features or Add and Remove Programs on XP, also from the same Location if using Office 2010, remove the Outlook Social Connector from the Office Install by clicking change (Dont know if 2007 uses this, we skipped over it due to many warnings on how bad it is) Dont just disable it in the Add ins, Microsoft likes to enable them after a few reboots. Let me know if these helped you also.

    Thanks

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  4. Anonymous
    2012-03-01T15:50:36+00:00

    I can't believe that MS hasn't addressed this issue. For additional info, this issue also exists with Word and the solution you suggest (thank you) is not valid as the option to ignore DDE programs does not exist in Word. I tried it in Excel....no error but still slow shutdown.

    FYI, all new installs on HP ProBook 4430s notebooks. Issue exists on all 8. Same install on HP 6200P PCs (3) and no issue with Word or Excel. Only difference is 32-bit OS on PCs and 64-bit on notebooks.

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