Excel Edit Delete Disabled

I created an Excel Workbook project using Visual Studio and VSTO. This project uses the ListObject control bound to a DataTable to display and update data in SQL Server 2000 database.

When deployed to the user's workstation, this application has an annoying habit of disabling the Delete item on the Edit menu, preventing the user from deleting columns, rows or cells. Actually this is more than annoying - it's a show stopper.

Researching the problem online produced very little in the way of amswers. Are other people seeing this behavior

I did find a reference in this forum article:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=309265&SiteID=1

which suggests deleting Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\Excel11.xlb. This works, but its not acceptable to require the user to delete this file every time their Edit menu goes wonky.

Does anyone know how to create and deploy a VSTO Excel Workbook application in such a way that prevents this problem from occuring

Hi Nikhil...

Unfortunately, one of my customers seems to be having this problem with the VSTO 2005 SE runtime installed.

While I have successfully been able to "fix" the problem by deleting the Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\Excel11.xlb file, I can not - as some other people have posted - use the code snippet you provided, as it will reset all toolbar customizations that my customer may have done (they are advanced Excel users and have many toolbar customizations). And forcing the customer to delete this file every time they use our VSTO solution is more than just an annoyance - it is a showstopper as they will not use our VSTO solution.

Do you have any other suggestions on how to fix this issue Even with VSTO 2005 SE runtime installed

Thanks,
Joe.

Clearly the ListObject is not re-enabling the Delete Column feature in all cases. You can finnd a workaround to this problem in this post:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=455328&SiteID=1

Specifically:

private void Sheet1_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

for (int i = 1; i <= this.Application.CommandBars.Count; i++)

this.Application.CommandBars[ i ].Reset();

}

This forces the command bars to reset when you close the workbook. In this way the Delete Column feature is guaranteed to be re-enabled.

Hi,

For now you can do this.:

private void Sheet1_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e){

this.Application.CommandBars[ "Column" ].Reset();

}

In this way only the customization related to 'Column' will be affected and 'delete column'/'insert column' will function again. I just want to confirm that this bug happens on my computers with VSTO 2005 SE installed (Office Excel 2003(11.6355.6408), SP1). Nikhil said that this issue had been logged, hopefully it will get addressed ASAP as it is a big showstopper (it's not localized and affects all the excel files on a user's computer).

Regards,

Gennady.

Hi all,

My original workaround was very invasive for most heavy users of excel customisations. Therefore, I have come up with something which will just re-enable a subset of excel funcitonality disabled by ListObject. Please note that this may conflict with your user's settings or other customisations that work on the same menu entries.

This should surely re-enable your menus. It is also worth noting that this is required only if you are using databound listobjects.