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adam_daunhauerFlag for United States of America

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Excel freezing when connecting to links to other data sources

I have a few users that have MS Excel freezing up when they open a spreadsheet that connects to a data source. Not just one spreadsheet, but any that connect to a data source.
In MS Office 2007 with those connections all in "Allow" mode in Trust Center, it freezes up upon opening. In MS Office XP you can actually see what is causing the freeze.
They open the excel sheet and click Enable Macros when that window opens, and then the Update window opens for the links to other data sources. If they click Update Excel freezes if they click Don't Update the file opens fine, but they are not getting all of the data they need.
Only Excel freezes up. They can switch between other applications just fine. We end up having to close Excel through task manager.

Any ideas?

A little background:
We have uninstalled and reinstalled a few different versions of MS Office with no luck. We have updated to all the latest Windows updates with no luck.
Here is the strangest part : This only happens for these users on some days. Sometimes they can open it no problem, but within a few days the problem has returned. These are desktop PC's that do not leave the office ,and it does not matter if the file is on their C: drive or a network drive.
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Eoin Ryan
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what is the datasource? another excel file or a database?
It may be getting locked, or something not closing right after accessing it hence the reason it's ok for a while afterwards but eventually starts to fail.

what's the code that runs in the macro to pull in the data?
related to above, the code may not be closing out the connection to the source correctly. But you'd need to post it.

In a nutshell I suspect your concurrent connections to the source are building up eventually leading to it crashing when trying to access the data source.
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ASKER

The Excel file has cells that reference a running application. Meaning the cell maight say this if I was referencing Quicken
=Quicken etc. etc.
I think I may have found a solution but I am waiting on the users to test it.
I seems when it is referencing that application it goes through a process where for example it would do a look for Program =Quicken until it locates it. Before it gets to that application another program running answers no I am not Quicken but it also freezes the search for =Quicken at that program.
I have an application that can find which other application is causing the lock (where it stops looking) but I am still waiting on the user.
If that makes any sence at all.
Can you manipulate the macro yourself? or is it all behind the scenes stuff? only thing I could suggest without seeing the macro would be to add some try/catch statements to avoid a crash if the application that responds isn't quicken.

Hope that's some help.
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adam_daunhauer
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I figued it out