This happens when something dealing with the file associations with excel stop working correctly. I am not sure what the exact cause is but I have only seen this in Citrix environments with Office 2007 installed. Opening spreadsheets through the excel program itself works correctly but trying to open a spreadsheet by opening the file through explorer or though a shortcut wont work.

To fix the problem…

1. Go to the folder options in control panel and select the “File Types” tab.

2. Navigate to the “xlsx” extension and click advanced. Under actions highlight “Open” and click “Edit”.

3. In the “Application used to perform action” box verify that the path to the excel executable is correct and then remove any switches that come after it. You will probably have to remove something like “/dde” or “/n” for example.

4. Once removed add /e “%1″ so that the box should read something like what you see below:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE” /e “%1″
NOTE: the “” around %1 are important.

5. Now uncheck “Use DDE”. Click OK and close out of all windows.
NOTE: if you reopen the advanced settings for the “open” action you will see that the DDE option has been re-checked off even though you un-checked it. This is ok.

If this works you will need to repeat this process for all of excels extensions that are affected like “csv” and “xls”.

Posted in Microsoft, MS Office
Tags: Excel, opens blank spread sheet