this does not help
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Browse All TopicsAfter installing Cognos Power Play 7.3 on a machine with Windows XP Professional English Service Pack 2 and MS Excel 2003 English SP 3 (MS Office Small Business Edition) and installing Power Play 7.3 Excel Add-in the add-in does not work.
The message which is received after initializing the Add-in is:
PPXLServer add-in initialisation: Connection to PowerPlay for Excel Server application has failed.
Could anybody know the solution of the problem?
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Does it work on any computers? Unfortuantely, the error is somewhat generic, so it's hard to pinpoint without some detailed troubleshooting. I'm still tempted to blame AV/Spyware scanners, or even firewalls, but I"d have to suggest contacting Cognos Support to do some config-specific troubleshooting.
Generally this add-in was working on the same computer with similar configuration. Since this happens locally on the machine I don't suppose that any firewall has to do with it. The antivirus system (McAfee) is not handling this type of validation, MS Excel security settings are set to Medium so any automatic scripts should be acknowledget by the user before executing but this does not happen since the add-in fails to initialize.
I would appreciate help from users/experts which had a similar problem before and already know the solution.
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by: RWrigleyPosted on 2008-07-28 at 10:37:08ID: 22105139
In Configuration Manager, select Cognos PowerPlay for Excel in the Components tab then perform a Validate/Apply on it. Now in MS Excel re-adding Cognos PowerPlay for Excel add-in should be OK. If not, check your anti-virus; it may be blocking the VBA macro that the powerplay add-in uses.