Excel Annoyances

EXCEL 2003 PROGRAM INTERACTION ANNOYANCES

CAN’T EXPORT A WEB PAGE TO AN EXCEL WORKBOOK

The Annoyance:

My company uses an intranet to make documents available to our workers in satellite offices, and one of my colleagues publishes her workbooks to a web page. In the past, all I’ve had to do to save one of her web worksheets to my hard drive is to right-click the sheet in my web browser and choose Export to Microsoft Excel from the shortcut menu. Everything worked fine until I reinstalled Office in a new directory. Now, when I click Export to Microsoft Excel, nothing happens. I don’t see any error messages or get any sort of warning, and I still can use both Internet Explorer and Excel, but the web workbook doesn’t open in Excel as it’s supposed to. What’s going on?

The Fix:

The problem is that when you changed the location of Excel on your computer, Internet Explorer lost track of the Excel executable and can no longer launch it when you try to export the web file. You can either reinstall Office 2003 to its original directory, or you can follow these steps to edit your Registry so that Internet Explorer knows where to find Excel. (Note: editing your Registry is an advanced exercise. If you’re not comfortable doing this, get someone to help you—or just reinstall.)

1. Choose Start → Run, type Regedit, and press Enter.

2. Choose File → Export → All, type a name for the exported backup copy of the Registry, and press Enter.

3. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Export ...