dealing with "Send a frown" in VBA

[Kenton Smith]

Hi everyone,

Within MS Windows 10, MS Excel 365 using ODBD connectivity and SQL we extract transactional data from an accounting database using Excel's built-in Power Pivot editor. 

When data is refreshed, I get a message box "Send a Frown" at unpredictable, inconsistent intervals. For example, it will work seamlessly for five or six times then suddenly it will fail, and give this "Send a frown" message.

A normal VBA error handler does not deal with this "Send a frown" message. Not even an "On Error Resume next" deals with it.  I can thus not capture or step-over the error (err) and deal with it in my code. When the "Send a frown" message appears, the entire process is on hold until I (the human) clicks on "Send a frown" or "Cancel". This is problematic since this process runs 3am in the morning on our servers for about 200 connection refreshes.

I don't mind the message, I mind the fact that I cannot control it via VBA.  

[#2]

Hey Kenton-

This behavior certainly seems strange/frustrating.  The Excel Team reviews all information collected from "Send a Frown" submissions.  Have you entered a description of the issue and submitted it to Microsoft?  You may not get a response, but at the minimum it will be logged as an issue and flagged for review.

[#3]

Hi Matt,

Thank you for your response. Yes, I did log the "Send a frown" with screenshots and detailed descriptions. Yes, Avital from Microsoft Excel Team contacted me requesting more information. He also sent me here to the tec community for a "work around" solution while they are working on the core issue. 

I however, don't think the problem is with Excel, but rather with "Microsoft Mashup Evaluation Container" as it runs as a sub background task under MS Excel during the refresh process. 

Is there a way to disable "Send a frown", as it's currently halting important processess?

[#4]

Hi Kenton,

I am currently dealing with a similar issue. The frown error message appears whenever I import data from an Access DB via VBA. I have tried everything I could think of to in order to bypass this message, but as you said nothing seems to work. I did read on another Microsoft that a possible solution to this issue is updating Excel to its most current version.

[#5]

Just a question - why are you using ODBC? Excel in Office 365 can bypass that and connect directly to the SQL Server in Get & Transform. That might remove the failure altogether. I know it doesn't help with the issue you are trying to trap, but we use Excel with our SQL server all of the time and I haven't seen a frown face on a data refresh in ages.