Excel designer cannot be activated

Question

I have Visual Studio 2013 and have a project in development that has worked for a couple of months. All of a sudden I was no longer able to open the excel worksheet in design mode as I get the error "Excel designer cannot be activated". I can open the code but not the excel designer. I have repaired, reinstalled both VS and Excel. I re-imaged my PC and it worked for about a week or so then I got the same error again. This should not occur or if it is something we are doing incorrectly Microsoft should be able to tell us what the issue is.

I have seen this question asked 3 times on here without one vote as a valid answer. Obviously this is a bug within Visual Studio. Is Microsoft going to respond with a fix or a workaround that resolves this issue? This issue hinders development of our office related application project.

One more piece of information. I found out that if someone else logs onto my workstation they do not have the issue. Therefore, this seems to be related to the registry for the current user.

Answer 1

Hello,

Did you try to create a new empty add-in project? Does the designer work as expected in that case?

Answer 2

I cannot create a Excel workbook project. I get "The project cannot be created".

Answer 3

Hi R Mand,

>>All of a sudden I was no longer able to open the excel worksheet in design mode as I get the error "Excel designer cannot be activated". <<

As far as I know, "Visual Studio Tools for Office Design-Time Adaptor for Excel" is used to work for it, please make sure this add-in is active.

Also I found an similar thread about this issue, please let me know whehter it is helpful.

Excel Designer cannot be activated

Regards & Fei

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Answer 4

Once I discovered that another user logged onto my PC did not experience the issue then I knew it was a corruption in my profile with Visual Studio. I deleted my profile off my PC and relogged on to create a new profile and it worked. However, I had to recreate a lot of settings that I had in other apps as they were lost when I deleted my profile.

This is really unacceptable as this seems to be a bug in Visual Studio that Microsoft should seem to be able to fix or identify the source of the issue.

Answer 5

Hi R Mand,

Thanks for sharing the workaround with us and it would be very helpful for the others who have the same issue.

>>This is really unacceptable as this seems to be a bug in Visual Studio that Microsoft should seem to be able to fix or identify the source of the issue. <<

As far as I know, we can submit a bug for the Visual Studio 2013 from link below:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio

Hope it is helpful.

Regards & Fei

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Answer 6

Downgrading resolves the issue.  

The temporary workaround is to roll-back to a previous version of Excel and disable automatic Office updates. 

 1. Open Excel > File > Account > Update Options > Disable Updates
    
 2. Note of your Office version under Office Updates

 3. Keep reverting to the previous version of Office 2013 / 2016 until issue is resolved:
     Start on Step 2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2770432

In my case, I went from 6965.2115 (December 13, 2016) to 6965.2105 (November 8, 2016)... but issue persisted.

Then down to 6965.2092 (October 11, 2016).. and ISSUE RESOLVED!

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As of Dec. 2016, there's no official Microsoft fix.

Here's the open BUG at Microsoft. Anyone facing this frustration, please up vote to voice your concerns so that Microsoft can take priority on this:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/3117015/excel-designer-cannot-be-activated-visual-studio