Unable to import excel files?

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Hi everyone, I have a weird one for you:

I have two new PC’s each with WinNT sp6a and MS Office97 pro (sr2). Both PC’s NT install was imaged from my company’s “std” machines.

The Office 97 install on both machines is a “custom” install with EVERYTHING included. But one of the machines has a problem while the other does not.

The problem:
When manually importing files into Access tables, the list of file types available does not include MS Excel (*.xls) files. I discovered this when a macro tried to import an Excel file on this machine and I got an error along the lines of “Unable to find installable ISAM file”.

I’m assuming that there is a file missing on the problem machine, but does anyone know what that file might be? Does this sound like an Office problem, or an NT problem? Will I have to re-install NT? I would like to avoid that if possible.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Has anyone fixed something like this before?

Thanks!

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Hi Rob,
I’m quite sure other Loungers will have more to say about this. Here’s my :
I’ve seen this problem before. The issue was caused by installing Office 97 without selecting all of the Data Access components. If, in fact, all of these components were installed on the offending machines, then I’m afraid my suggestion won’t help any. However, you may want to re-run the Office97 setup and double check to make sure that all of the Data Access components were actually installed.

HTH

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Hi Mark,

I think (hope) you are right. We tried to re-run the Office97 setup last week and I thought we had everything included, but I’m not sure how carefully we checked the data access options.

Shortly after I sent my previous post, I checked the microsoft knowledgebase and found article Q155666, entitled “Troubleshoot ‘Couldn’t find Installable ISAM’ Error”, and it says pretty much what you told me. The file in question is MSXCL35.DLL, but when I checked today, both machines had that file. If nothing else, I now know what ISAM means (indexed sequential access method)

I don’t have admin priveldges to run setup, so on Monday I will try running setup again and see what happens.

Thanks for your help,

Rob

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This article deals with your situation.
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/ar…s/Q171/9/55.asp

Good luck.

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Thanks! By following the information in both microsoft articles, I was able to solve the problem.

Since the necessary files were installed in the proper location, the problem must have been in the windows registry.

My co-workers are happy once more!

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