Outlook and Excel, sitting in a tree...
You may be aware that I am a fan of Apple's hardware.
I have a Mac Pro at work, and the wife and I both have an iPhone and a MacBook Pro. All of the iOS development work and the vast majority of the design work I do takes place in OS X.
At the office, however, the overwhelming majority of our web development is done on the Microsoft stack - Windows, IIS, SQL Server and ASP.NET using C# - with a few odds and sods, like blogging, taking place using open source code on a LAMP stack. We use Exchange 2003 for our email and a bunch of the accounting forms I have to deal with have macros, so I need to have the Windows edition of Office installed.
Getting to the point
Recently, since installing Office 2010, my Windows machine lost the ability to open an Excel spreadsheet from an email. Ordinarily, this wouldn't bother me, but over the last week I've had a metric shit-ton of spreadsheets emailed to me and it was becoming steadily more tedious when I would double click on a file only to be greeted with an empty Excel window.
No error message; no problem reported; no hanging; no spreadsheet. Silent failures are probably the most annoying, because there's no way to know that something's gone wrong - apart from the fact that the file you wanted hasn't loaded.
Hey, that's happening to me too!
Digging around the internets unearthed solutions ranging from repairing the installation, to going through the registry and to using the /regserver option on the Excel executable. None of these options work, so don't waste your time trying them.
The real culprit is an option within the Advanced section of Excel's options:
Simply make sure that the "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange" is unchecked and your Excel workbooks will once again open as expected when you double click them from within Outlook.
All of this should hopefully become a moot point in a few weeks' time, when Microsoft finally gets round to releasing Office 2011 for the Mac, which brings Outlook back to a platform it's been absent from for almost a decade.
