Forum Discussion
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?
Hi Abhimanyu,
From our service logs, I found that your form was truly created from Excel. I can see the excel file info
{
WorkbookId: "drives/b!QB_j3D3OCkaltV6FsXy_73P0zVPS60tCkV9ozfDI4M-PV311TEftQJ78NF5wGyIo/items/01N6DO3N...",
Origin: "Excel",
Title: "Book1"
}
So I guess you might forget the creation entry of the form. And then the excel file "Book1" might be considered as a useless file and be deleted.
You can reexport your data to a new excel file by the steps:
1. click the button "Open in Excel", it will open a page tab.
2. copy the url of the new page, it looks like: https://forms.office.com/Pages/RedirectToExcelPage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180ZNV4u&forceReExport=false
3. change the "false" to "true" in the end of the url, like:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/RedirectToExcelPage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180ZN4u&forceReExport=true
4. open the new url in browser then you will see all the data in a new excel file.Hope it will help.
Thanks,
Qingwen
- Zhongzhong_Li
Microsoft
Hi Abhimanyu Singh, i have reported your problem to the engineering team.
- Qingwen Zeng
Hi, I'm the engineer of the feature.
As you said, you created the form from forms.office.com, you shouldn't have got a form that connects to an onedrive excel workbook. It's too weird, I need to dig in it to see what happend.
so Could you plese provide the link of your form page? That can help us to find the cause.
Thanks,
Qingwen
Qingwen Zeng wrote:Hi, I'm the engineer of the feature.
As you said, you created the form from forms.office.com, you shouldn't have got a form that connects to an onedrive excel workbook. It's too weird, I need to dig in it to see what happend.
so Could you plese provide the link of your form page? That can help us to find the cause.
Thanks,
Qingwen
Thank you Qingwen Zeng for responding. Please note the link to that form: https://forms.office.com/Pages/DesignPage.aspx?fragment=FormId%3DkgmvRZbbx02k80dN7-wYrfbYZsc6ejFEsm9xgTf9GVFUN0ZSRVFLNjA0OFRWRFlYNVhOVU1CUVFLVi4u%26Token%3Dca7aba2f39164b2ab1c698db30398fc9
Yes this is very weird. As I said, I already opened a support ticket, but until now they haven't been able to do anything. The ticket Id is SRX1400328584ID.
I told them that if they need more time, then at least give an extract of raw data from the unerdlying database, so that I can get on with business. But even this is not happening and I am getting a flak every passing day!
- Qingwen Zeng
Hi Abhimanyu,
From our service logs, I found that your form was truly created from Excel. I can see the excel file info
{
WorkbookId: "drives/b!QB_j3D3OCkaltV6FsXy_73P0zVPS60tCkV9ozfDI4M-PV311TEftQJ78NF5wGyIo/items/01N6DO3N...",
Origin: "Excel",
Title: "Book1"
}
So I guess you might forget the creation entry of the form. And then the excel file "Book1" might be considered as a useless file and be deleted.
You can reexport your data to a new excel file by the steps:
1. click the button "Open in Excel", it will open a page tab.
2. copy the url of the new page, it looks like: https://forms.office.com/Pages/RedirectToExcelPage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180ZNV4u&forceReExport=false
3. change the "false" to "true" in the end of the url, like:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/RedirectToExcelPage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180ZN4u&forceReExport=true
4. open the new url in browser then you will see all the data in a new excel file.Hope it will help.
Thanks,
Qingwen
Qingwen ZengHi! I am having the exact same problem. My link is https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=NXF4KzrKbEi9CvYBX785uPg9cfHcN6tItC8ux92Zgg5UMDVVM1lLVEY1RDQxOEFSOEZVRlAyVEYwRSQlQCN0PWcu
what can I do?
I had the same problem. I tried Chrome and Edge and had the same results.
After downloading and (re)installing Internet Explorer and opening it there, the file actually opened in SharePoint.
- I had a similar issue, and entered a test entry into my form, and found that even though when I clicked Open in Excel and got the "Excel workbook is missing" fail, that a new workbook (numbered 1) stored same place in my OneDrive with all of the responses thus far (including my test one) was there. It looks like Microsoft fixed the issue as long as you can get to the owner's file storage.
