Cannot enable the Excel add-in.

[John 27182]

Hi Everyone.

At work we have had the "Contributor Excel Add-in" installed on everyone's PCs for a long time. However last week a problem cropped up with somebody's computer.

When I try to enable the add-in in Excel a dialogue box pops up complaining that "Error opening the 'Contributor Excel Add-in' add-in. Method 'Attach' of object '_AddinServer' failed". It then causes Excel to crash. I've tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the "Contributor for Excel Add-in" program, but this error remains.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Many thanks.

[ericlfg]

Hi John,

What version of planning is being used?  Are there any other cognos products installed on this system?  (Planning Administrative Tools, Framework Manager, etc)
What version of Excel is being used?

I've seen similar issues when there is a version mismatch between the CEA installed and the server.  I would compare the cmplst.txt (in the cer4 or c8 folder) from the end user system and the server.  If the versions check out, it's hard to say what's going on.  Doing a quick google search didn't reveal any hits.  I suspect that this is a one-off and might take some creativity to get past. 

Maybe start fresh and ensure that everything cognos related is uninstalled (if you can).  Make sure that the associated Cognos folder is deleted from the file system and restart the system.  Perform another install, ensuring that the version used matches the server and test.  If you're still having problems after this see if you can edit the properties of the add-in. 

You may also want to consider reinstalling Office.

Maybe someone else has a thought on how to get this working.

[John 27182]

Hi Eric,

We're using Planning 8.3. There isn't any other versions of Cognos installed. And we're using excel 03.

I haven't yet managed to solve the problem. Luckily it seems that perhaps it isn't that urgent after all. Nonetheless if I do manage to find a solution I will post the answer

As you say, this is probably a one-off problem which involves playing with the idiosyncratic properties of the computer first until the solution is found.

Cheers for the help.

[sparrow_34]

Hi,

I have this same issue, did you every come up witha fix for this?

Regards Paul