Forum Discussion
OLE Links incompatible with DOCX format?? Help...
My company creates documents which link hundreds of excel spreadsheet cells and tables to Word through OLE links (Paste Special, paste as link, paste as worksheet object or unformatted text).
There seems to be a bug or incompatibility with the DOCX file format for documents with many of these OLE links. They work ok for a while but inevitably the document becomes corrupted and cannot open except in safe mode and then the Repairs involve breaking a bunch of the links. When the document becomes corrupted, the Word doc cannot open and appears to be background opening/updating each excel link even though my settings are not to update automatic links upon opening a document. (The document will open fine on a computer not connected to our network because it cannot find the linked excel document to background update the links.)
I've tried to set all of my OLE links to "Manual" update instead of "Auto" but they revert back to Auto every time I close out of the dialog box, and I'm wondering if this functionality may be part of the problem.
This issue doesn't happen when we save in the .DOC format (Excel 97). I do not have any way to fix this problem and keep my content linked between word and excel without saving as .DOC but doing so prevents me from using functionality we want that is only available in DOCX.
Has anyone encountered this issue or have any ideas for a workaround that will let me save in DOCX while maintaining the OLE links functionality? I've seen other companies use VBA to program content controls that do the same thing but it seems like wasted effort to get around functionality that should be built into the software.
8 Replies
I have some updates on problems I've been having with the use of OLE links in DOCX files (and recently in DOC files as well). I want to document some progress I've had on this issue for anyone searching for help.
With DOCX files, one of the main problems with OLE links was that Excel was background opening when we opened the file and looking at each individual link while the file opened. This would create read-only conflicts when opening the spreadsheet directly in Excel when it was already opened in the background, and the documents would open very slowly. At some point the documents would become corrupt and crash Word.
I found an old Microsoft Support article that recommends a registry edit which stops the background link checking and excel opening. That article is here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/a-word-2010-document-reopens-slowly-after-you-insert-some-linked-objects-that-are-located-on-a-network-share-6338a37c-ba7b-0ee7-2b29-7de018fddb3c
The DOCX files now open immediately. I have yet to determine whether they eventually become corrupt anyway, but at this point, the files can open without excel opening in the background and without conflicts of multiple versions of excel being open.
A separate problem with OLE link functionality occurred just this past week with an Office 365 update to Build 2207. While many of my company's computers handled this update fine, the update made some changes to the functionality of OLE links that broke their functionality in a number of my company's laptops. This occurred in both DOC and DOCX files on those machines. Specifically, linked files would update fine, but once the location of the links was directed to a different excel file, the updating the links caused and ERROR link not found message. A second update of the same links often resolved and properly updated but in many cases the ERROR messages toggled back and forth. In addition, links embedded within tables updated with improper formatting.
For this breaking of the links functionality with build 2207, the only resolution I have found is to revert to a prior build of Office 365. I reverted to build 2204 and the links functionality is once again fully stable.- Try working around the issue by using CTRL+a to select everything in the document and then use CTRL+F11 to lock the fields and saving the document before closing it. You can use CTRL+SHIFT+F11 to unlock the fields when required.
Doug_Robbins_Word_MVP I like this workaround suggestion quite a bit but after locking all the fields in the document and reopening the document in Word, it still looks for each field in Excel when opening the document and takes quite a bit of time to open the file as it tries to find the source of each OLE link. This did allow me to open the document (whereas before it would get corrupted and totally crash) but it is a very slow open - several minutes. I'm open to any other ideas/suggestions you have thank you!!
AmandaAaron Does the data come for a single Excel workbook, or from multiple workbooks?
If it is just from one workbook, if you upload a copy of the Word document with the fields locked, and a copy of the workbook, I will investigate the issue.
