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I am trying to help a customer with a specific problem that they are having with deploying an Excel 2007 Worksheet to users if they are running Excel 2010.

The spreadsheet in question has 5 to 6 links to external workbooks that are not available to the recipients (ie, broken links). Nonetheless, if the receiving user is running Excel 2007, they can open it and edit it (within limits) without errors, and this is what the customer wants them to be able to do.

However, if the user is running Excel 2010, when they open the workbook, most of the cells have #VALUE# errors in them. Diagnosing them it turns out that they have Value Errors because they are referencing cells that also have Value Errors. Tracing them back (its a large 45 sheet workbook), we eventually find that they are coming from the Links.

Through experimentation we found that if the 2010 users open it in Protected-Mode the errors do not appear, but strangely, they do still appear if it is opened in Read-Only mode. (Neither of these would be acceptable in any event as the users have to be able to edit their copies)

So my questions are:

  1. Why is this working for 2007, but not for 2010? And,

  2. Is there some setting or workaround we can use to get it to work for the 2010 users?


Things I have tried:

  • Disabling the Advanced Option "Update Links to other documents" for the 2010 users. We could not get this to work because it is a workbook-specific setting so we ha to have the workbook open before we could change it and by then the cells already had errors in them.

  • Disabling the Advanced Option "Update Links to other documents" on 2007 and then sending it to the 2010 user. Unfortunately, this also appears to be a user-specific setting, so that doesn't work either.


Obviously, I know that distributing the linked workbooks with the spreadsheet is one fix. However, this is not workable for several reasons including that those workbooks have external links of their own, etc. (yes I know this is "not good", nonetheless..)

Also, we could "just" re-write the Workbook to not have the links. This is our ultimate fallback option, but it is probably several weeks worth of work to acheive this, so almost anything else is more desireable at this point.


(if this is the wrong forum for this, please re-direct me appropiately)

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I've seen some issues where Excell 2007 and 2010 do not play very nicely with versions of excel files other than it's own.. One workaround maybe to try resaving the file as an .xls in another program like OpenOffice or Google Docs (this has surprisingly cleared alot of issues for me in the past). The obvious downside is that 07/10 formats allow for my rows and columns and could be an issue if you have any data past 65025 rows or column XY (I think).

The real answer maybe that there isn't a good answer until Microsoft can address this as a fix in an update. Microsoft sort of offers some solutions, but it seems you are definitely dealing with a versioning issue.

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