SIMS and Excel (Microsoft 365)

[TLARWise]

We have a laptop that we have SIMS and Microsoft 365 installed on however when we try to export data to Excel we get an error message:

 

When trying to Export to Excel from the Reports > Student Lists section the error is 'Unable to Launch Excel'.

When trying to run a report using Excel from the Reports > Run/Design Reports sections the error is 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object'.

 

Exporting reports to Word works fine and the Excel exports work fine on computers using Office 2019.

 

Is anyone else successfully using SIMS and Excel 365 together and if so did you have to do anything to get it working or did it just work OK straight away?

[Seb1780]

Try this thread

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/152364-object-reference-not-set-instance-object-error-when-running-reports.html

[ThatSIMSGuy]

An issue appears to have been identified with Office 365 Enterprise and it seems to be due to a misconfiguration with Office on the workstation.

The best thing to do is uninstall Office using Microsoft's uninstall tool

Then do a clean reinstall of Office.

Check in Programs and features that there aren't multiple office versions, e.g. additional language packs

[TLARWise]

I can confirm that reinstalling Office 365 fixed the issue.

[SeniorFeet]

This is more for anyone else's benefit who may come across this thread, we've had this error on numerous machines and have worked out what it is through Process Monitor. It appears that during an office upgrade, the app paths in the registry aren't populated correctly, when Pulsar.exe tries to reference these you get the error message listed above. The entries are listed under: "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\Winword.exe", "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\Excel.exe" etc. <-- Edit, not sure why but undesired spaces have been added in the registry locations on the post for some reason.

 

You can populate the sub key values (using a working machine as reference) and you should find that generating reports now works. A lot quicker than having to reinstall office and can be deployed via GPO/Script etc.

Edited July 12, 2022 by jackfeet