XLL fails registration with multiple Excel versions installed

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XLL fails registration with multiple Excel versions installed
 
Yuri Astrakhan




Posts: 53
 Joined: 2006-05-19
I built a simple XLL addin (office version independent), which installs and runs fine on a machine with just Excel 2007, but when I ran setup on a machine that has both Excel 2003 & 2007, setup only registered new UDFs with Excel 2003, but not with Excel 2007.

Is there a manual configuration or override steps that need to be taken?

Thanks!
Posted 29 Jan, 2008 01:54:43 Top
Sergey Grischenko


Add-in Express team


Posts: 7233
 Joined: 2004-07-05
Hi Yuri.

Please try to transfer the registration entry from the 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Options' key to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Options'.

Posted 29 Jan, 2008 09:59:36 Top
Yuri Astrakhan




Posts: 53
 Joined: 2006-05-19
Sergey, copying an "OPEN" string value
/R "C:\Documents and Settings\...\adxloader.XlFuncs.dll" from the 11th version to the registry HCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Options solved it.

Would it be possible for setup to automatically find all Excel versions, or possibly give the user a choice during installation?

Thanks!
Posted 29 Jan, 2008 12:04:35 Top
Sergey Grischenko


Add-in Express team


Posts: 7233
 Joined: 2004-07-05
Yuri, I am not sure that it is the correct choice installing several versions of MS Office on one PC. At least Microsoft doesn't support such situation at all. Moreover, I think it can be useful at the development time only.
Posted 29 Jan, 2008 12:24:23 Top
Yuri Astrakhan




Posts: 53
 Joined: 2006-05-19
Sergey, I totally agree with you that it is not the most desirable to have multiple Excel versions. Unfortunately, I have seen one too many people with multiple versions (e.g. they installed Office 2007 which gives you an option to keep Office 2003 - because they like the speed of Excel 2003 graphs for financial analysis, whereas Excel 2007 has much better presentation capabilities and higher limits, etc...).

Strangely enough: I run excel by typing "excel" into the Start/Run box. Two machines have both Excel versions installed, but they differ - 1st runs 2007 by default, and the 2nd runs 2003 by default (don't know how this came to be). When I tried installing my sample on the first, 2007 got the addin, but on the 2nd - addin was added to 2003rd.

Since users are typically not very technical, this can be very confusing and might cause many support calls.
Posted 29 Jan, 2008 13:57:39 Top
Sergey Grischenko


Add-in Express team


Posts: 7233
 Joined: 2004-07-05
Hi Yuri.

I think all is simple. When you type 'excel' in the Run dialog, it runs the Excel version which has been installed the last.
Posted 30 Jan, 2008 08:10:24 Top