Re: Real Workaround for Excel Link Bug in 2007?

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

Steve,

Thanks for the quick replies. Copying the Excel file into the local directory wouldn't be a good tactic for me. But it makes me
wonder if creating a link in the local directory would work?

Regarding passing it the problem up the line, that'd be great. But it's already the subject of a knowledgebase article, so I suspect
the folks up in Redmond know about it. I'm still >>amazed<< that they haven't fixed it yet. It's been over a year since product
launch, and this strikes me as a pretty serious flaw.

- Mark

On Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:28:46 EST, Steve Rindsberg <abuse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

To verify what's going on here, what specific types of links is PPT losing?
How exactly were they created?

There are several ways of doing this and sometimes the exact path to success or failure is
significant.

I can repro this with text/numbers I copy from an Excel 2007 (SP1) work*** then switch to PPT
and PasteSpecial as Excel work*** object. I'm on a Win2000 server using mapped drives, fwiw,
so it's not a 2003-specific bug.

When I save, close and reopen the file, I get a message to the effect that the link can't be
updated; if I doubleclick the object, PPT tells me it can't find the file, which is patent
nonsense (the same presentation contains charts that are linked from the same Excel file; it
updates those w/o problems).

If I examine the link information (using the Edit Links dialog box or a better tool that lets
me see and edit each link) the link is correct.

As a side issue, or perhaps it's a related lunacy, each Excel file I save to the server appears
in the MRU list twice, once pointed at the mapped drive, once at the UNC path to the same file.

I'm going to report this up the line; if you can fill in more details, send 'em along.


In article <bc18t3hup13q7jsreqfabl63anck2i4lrk@xxxxxxx>, Mark Olbert wrote:
I have a bunch of PP2007 docs that use -- try to use -- links to Excel 2007 workbooks...all
of which reside on a Win2003 Server
platform accessed via a mapped drive.

This means I am intimately familiar, unfortunately, with a ridiculous bug in PP2007: it can't
"remember" links to Excel docs on file
servers (plus several other kinds of file-hosting environments, too).

Has anyone come up with a workaround to this problem? The one suggested in the one
knowledgebase article I found on the subject
would be funny if it weren't so stupid (basically, the official "workaround" is to recreate
all the linked objects every time you
re-open a powerpoint; hello, Microsoft, that sort of defeats the purpose of having linked
documents!!).

Failing that, does anyone know when this glaring (do any of the developers who write this
stuff up in Redmond actually >>use<< the
product??) bug is expected to be fixed?



-----------------------------------------
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

.

Quantcast