If the Modeling Studio just appears to “hang” when loading reports, it may have to do with Excel’s Compatibility Checker. This just happened to poor Amy, and it’s worth remembering for everyone using Modeling Studio on your projects. (This is all of you, right?) Here's what's going on.
By now you’ve probably gotten used to seeing (and probably ignoring) this warning dialog when you save an Excel workbook:
Sometimes this can be useful, if you're using some advanced feature of Excel 2007 that just won't work in previous versions of Excel. However, most of the time it means that you've used formatting or colors that may show up differently on your customer's machine.
The kicker about this dialog is that it won't show you exactly where the problems are. It must know, right? I mean it was somehow able to count 28 instances. "Ha ha, we know where all the problems are but we won't tell you!" Maybe this feature will come with a future Service Pack or something. But I digress...
The Modeling Studio also needs to save the Excel outputs workbook whenever it loads new reports. This happens when you either check Load Reports within the Simulation Run Control dialog, or when you define a link type as LoadReportsAndOpenExcel. The Modeling Studio engine uses the same functionality as you would by clicking the Save button, so if the compatibility checker dialog pops up for you, it’ll also pop up for the Modeling Studio.
Unfortunately, as reports are being loaded, Excel is invisible – so you might not even see that dialog pop up. This has the sad side effect of making it appear that your Modeling Studio is “hanging” and your reports never get loaded.
What’s happening is that the invisible Excel process is waiting for a response from you. If you ALT-Tab, you’ll be able to find this dialog, probably behind all of your other windows, and click Continue.
Obviously this is not ideal! But we haven’t yet figured out a way to always suppress this dialog in the code. If anyone knows of any tricks, please let our Modeling Studio team know. As I mentioned to Brian (remember him?), there are two choices here to solve the proble
- Find and fix the compatibility issue.
- Disable the compatibility checker for this specific workbook.
You can disable the Compatibility Checker by clearing the checkbox in the dialog, then saving the workbook. If you ever want to run it again, you can do so by clicking the Office Ribbon icon (top left corner) / Prepare / Run Compatibility Checker.
Note that our customers would never see this issue, unless they are using Office 2007 as well.
