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

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 ar...
microsoft forms
  • Qingwen Zeng's avatar
    Qingwen Zeng
    Oct 12, 2017

    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 Zeng's avatar
Qingwen Zeng
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 12, 2017

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

Abhimanyu Singh's avatar
Abhimanyu Singh
Steel Contributor
Oct 12, 2017

Thanks a lot Qingwen Zeng for your efforts.

 

1. I talked to the user who created this form, and she is sure about the process she took to create it. In fact, when I gave the training I never talked about Excel Survey via OneDrive. I only showed them how to login to forms.office.com and create forms there. During the support ticket calls, I asked her to show me how did she create the form step-by-step. And this dummy form did not have problems, but the process was the same. So, it definitely is weird. (Two entry points to the same service is anyways confusing and redundant, but that is another story and rant for another day.)

 

2. I tried the method you suggested of turning the "forceReExport" querystring to "true". But this also does not work, and throws another error:

 

Error when forceReExport is set to true

 

 

 

  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Mar 21, 2018

    Hi All 

    We are experiencing the same issue and updating the URL from "False" to "True" did not work for us.  Was there something different that you did in order to get this to work?

     

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