Black Manticore

Opening Excel workbooks from Explorer fails

by lunarg on November 5th 2007, at 22:16

Had this issue with one of my clients: he was unable to open spreadsheets from his desktop or from his Windows Explorer. Double-clicking on the file opens a new, empty Excel session, and an error message is displayed.
After a quick search on the Microsoft support site, I found a solution.

Symptoms

When attempting to open an Excel spreadsheet from the desktop or from Windows Explorer (or any other program), a new, empty Excel session is started, and an error message is shown:

Quote: Cannot find the file path (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available.

Quote: Windows cannot find FilePathFileName, Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

Cause

Apparently, there is an option in Excel, called Ignore other applications, which effectively disables the acceptance of so-called DDE calls from applications other than Excel. Excel uses DDE to open Excel spreadsheets, and thus, enabling this option will result in failure to open documents from the desktop or any other application (aside from Excel).

This behaviour exists in Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.

Solution

Turning off the Ignore other applications is the only way.

Excel 2003

Start Excel 2003. In the menu, find Tools, then click on Options to open the options dialog:

In the General tab, uncheck the box next to Ignore other applications:

Finally, click OK to confirm. You should now be able to open documents from outside Excel again.

Excel 2007

Start Excel 2007. Click on the yellow Microsoft Office orb (upper-left) to open the main menu. In the lower-right corner, click on the Excel options button:

The options dialog appears. In the left list, select Advanced. In the main pane, scroll down until you find the General section. There, uncheck the box next to Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE):