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Odd error: if I click on an Excel 2007 file to open it from within explorer, it says "There was a problem sending a command to the program". Excel opens - but it doesn't open the file. I have to then manually open the original file using Excel's "File..Open" dialogue.

All of my other Office 2007 apps work fine, including Word, etc.

Any ideas?

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migrated from serverfault.com Sep 9 '10 at 6:29

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3 Answers

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Fixed the problem by upgrading to Excel 2010. Initially I tried the 64-bit version, however, when none of my prior plugins loaded, I switched back to the 32-bit version which worked perfectly. Office 2010 is much nicer - it loads way faster.

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up vote 3 down vote

In Excel's options (Orb -> Excel Options -> Advanced -> General) uncheck Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange. (I had this problem with Excel 2003; it didn't give the error message, but instead just opened the program without loading the spreadsheet.)

MS Knowledge Base entry

Another page specifically mentioning this error and solution

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Thanks for the great hints - however, when I tried all of them (including unchecking the DDE option, installing SP2, etc), it didn't seem to fix the problem. – Gravitas Aug 4 '10 at 17:18
@Gravitas Have you tried running Setup on the Office installation DVD, and picking the "Repair" option? It's never helped for me, but maybe you'll be luckier. :-) – coneslayer Aug 6 '10 at 12:05
Thx, I'll try that. – Gravitas Aug 11 '10 at 22:11
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up vote 0 down vote

there is a bug in excel that sometimes gets triggered and causes this. It's an advanced setting with DLL in it.

coneslayer's answer is more precise.

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Thanks - I tried coneslayers advice, but it didn't seem to work. Oh well, I can always just upgrade to Office 2010, that'll certainly fix the problem. – Gravitas Aug 4 '10 at 17:19
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