Embedding a PDF Object in Excel

[cdwyersandysecondary]

Hi all,

 

One of our staff is using their personal laptop and O365 to create excel docs. Their laptop has Adobe Acrobat Reader installed and when they embed a PDF object in Excel, rather than it embedding as a 'shell object' it embeds as an 'Acrobat PDF Document'

 

If you then open these docs on a machine without Acrobat, the pdf fails to open.

 

We cannot seem to find a way to force Excel to embed as a shell object with Acrobat installed. We have disabled the add in, changed the default PDF reader; all to no avail.

 

Has anyone got any ideas? (uninstalling acrobat is not an option)

 

Thanks as always!

[Steve21]

By default it’ll embed a file association to whatever the pc that’s saving it uses

 

So if Acrobat is installed (and defaulted) it would normally embed that way, but if the file association isn’t with acrobat it shouldn’t embed that way

 

Appreciate you don’t want to uninstall it but is changing file associations an option?

 

Otherwise think you’ll have problems without scripting imports etc

 

Steve

[cdwyersandysecondary]

Thanks for your response! we did change the default app that PDF's open with to edge, but it still happens. Do you know if there are some other extensions it uses that we may need to change?

 

Chris

[TechMonkey]

Out of curiosity, why are they embedding a PDF into Excel?

[cdwyersandysecondary]

Honestly, I'm not sure! it is the finance manager and she is very particular, removing acrobat is absolutely not an option and this is how she MUST do things! Lol.

[nadeem]

Hi all,

 

One of our staff is using their personal laptop and O365 to create excel docs.

 

Has anyone got any ideas? (uninstalling acrobat is not an option)

 

Idea 1) "We don't support personal laptops" so bye bye

 

Idea 2) Presumably these Excel docs are reused within the school - go for path of least resistance - install Adobe Reader on the other computers

[TechMonkey]

Honestly, I'm not sure! it is the finance manager and she is very particular, removing acrobat is absolutely not an option and this is how she MUST do things! Lol.

 

That's how I'd address it. What are they trying to achieve and find a better way of doing it. Fallback position of personal laptop.

 

Excel is not a PDF viewer and not setup for reams of text.

 

It pains me when staff decide to do massive schemes of work in Excel because they want a table, only to come a cropper when they have to edit text or try and fit a page worth of text into a single cell. Also, the many calls about how to do bullet points in a cell, how to make one word bold in a sentence, etc, etc.

[cdwyersandysecondary]

I wish I could say Idea 1! lol, every establishment has 'that' staff member - she is ours!

 

The issue is that these documents are sent to external clients, who may or may not have acrobat!

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Agreed, I suppose all I can really do is suggest she doesn't make work related documents on her personal laptop and uses her work issued one. Thanks!

[TechMonkey]

The issue is that these documents are sent to external clients, who may or may not have acrobat!

 

This is another reason to not do it this way. Although it may seem unthinkable that someone doesn't have a PDF reader installed, you cannot guarantee embedding in Excel will work. I wonder how Google Sheets reacts to that?

 

This is one of those ideas that seems innocuous and may seem easier to go along with, especially if the user is a special little snowflake, but will cause you more issues in the long run and probably be spun out to be your fault that it isn't working. Knock it on the head and find a proper solution and document objections for CYA.

[nadeem]

The issue is that these documents are sent to external clients, who may or may not have acrobat!

 

External clients as in suppliers to the school? Or is this a completely personal project/thing?

 

If its completely personal on a personal laptop - RUN!