Excel Add-In OLE Action

Hi All,

 

I wanted to see if anyone has been encountering this issue with the Excel Add-In. Oftentimes members of my team will go into Excel, log into the add-in, and then the whole Excel Application feezes. It freezes for a few minutes and then comes up with a message box saying "Microsoft excel is waiting for another application to complete an ole action" and then resumes normal activity.

 

This happens at least once a day for each member of my team, and I was wondering if this is attributable to the Anaplan Add-In and if there are any tips on how to fix this. Also for more context in case this is relevant, we save all of our Excel files on a shared Google Drive.

 

Thank you in advance for everyone's help!

Answers

  • @charrington 

    I haven't encountered that specific issue before with the Excel Add-In. But here are some thoughts:

    • First, we should definitely pull @MagaliP into the conversation. She's all knowing when it comes to 3rd party add-ins.
    • Check out the landing page for all the add-ins. There's a really good support section that shows all the known issues. I didn't see the OLE message there but maybe there are other clues that will lead to the right issue.
    • Make sure the user's are on the most up to date Excel Add-In Version.
    • Are your users accessing Excel through Citrix? Sometimes there are some compatibility issues.
    • Lastly, I've done a lot of Excel VBA programming and this message looks very familiar to me. I vaguely remember having problems accessing data from SharePoint from file servers that are geographically separated (e.g. someone from France is trying to access data that is physically stored in Italy). If you're Excel Spreadsheet has any VBA code, make sure it's up to date and not causing the issue.

    Just some thoughts but if anyone knows it will probably be @MagaliP 

  • Hi @charrington,

     

    I am sorry to hear you are experiencing issues with the Excel add-in. This issue is not something we have documented at the moment but we think it might be related to the add-in launching web-based actions as part of the login whilst Excel is trying to save on Google Drive at the same time. You may try to save the file locally first, and then update it to Google Drive manually afterwards.

     

    If this does not work, we would be happy to investigate if you email Anaplan Support. Let us know 😀

  • Thank you so much for your help!

  • Thank you so much for your help! I will see if saving locally helps solve the problem, and if not I will reach out to support.

  • This is something we have also experienced / raised support tickets to investigate.

     

    It can be really frustrating as once this happens you are forced to end task on excel as clicking ok on the error message just generates an identical one. This means if you haven't saved the workbooks you were working on you will lose work.

     

    We are not using google drive and I haven't been able to identify when it happens. It's like the process has not got to calling the webpage but that it still knows it should be waiting for one to open.