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Abhimanyu Singh's avatar
Abhimanyu Singh
Steel Contributor
Oct 11, 2017

Open in Excel - Error: Cannot open Excel workbook

We are facing a typical problem with one of the forms since last one week. We have opened a ticket as well, but no resolution even after 1 week. The only response I am getting from support is, "we are looking at it"!

 

Before you ask, please note that the form having problem (and other forms which are working), have been created directly on forms.office.com. They have NOT been created through OneDrive via Create New Excel Survey.

 

This peculiar problem manifests itself when viewing responses. The "Open in Excel" button shows a small cloud icon overlay on the Excel icon, which says that something is wrong somewhere:

 

The Excel icon shows a cloud overlay

Once we click on that button, a new window/tab opens up showing a loading indicator for "opening in OneDrive"! Notice how the new page is called "RedirectToExcelPage.aspx"!

 

Form with problem open a new tab/window, loading indicator

After a few seconds, it throws up an error saying,  "Cannot open Excel workbook
The Excel workbook cannot be found. Please check if the workbook is deleted"!

 

Error thrown

I am wondering why does it insist on opening the Excel file from OneDrive, when clearly the form is not created from OneDrive via "Excel Surveys". On other forms, it is just working fine.

 


This is how it looks on other forms (and how it should actually look like) without the cloud icon overlay:

 

How Excel icon looks like on other forms

And this is how it opens up Excel inline (and downloads and opens file-save dialog) on the same tab/page itself:

 

On other forms, it opens inline on the same tab/page

 

<Start Rant >

I don't get it how half-baked things are being spewed out by Microsoft in recent times? It becomes very embarassing when I encourage my users to start using O365 products and services instead of third-party products like SurveyMonkey which my users are comfortable with. When such issues happen, my users retort back blaming me, and go back to third-party services in hordes. This is not the first such embarassment I have had. Groups, Teams, Planner all have given me such headaches. Groups being the worst.

</End Rant >


Has anyone of you encountered this problem? 

 

Is there any other way I can get the raw data? I tried using flow, but the trigger is only for new responses and that too it asks for a response-id for action. Totally confusing that is. Is there any PowerShell or API by which I can get the raw data out?

 

 

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