What does “Microsoft Office Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action.” mean?

Question

I have a working RTD Excel automation add-in similar to the one described here. Intermittently, while attempting to load a sheet that includes this formula I get the following error:

Microsoft Office Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action.

I have checked and unchecked "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)" per some forum discussion (which I can no longer locate). Neither works.

Google yields many hits for this error but no resolutions. There is an ancient knowledge base article here but again no resolution.

What is causing this error? Is there anything that I can do to avoid it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

After bringing Excel up in the debugger and hitting break all it appears that my add-in is deadlocking in ConnectData. You win this time Excel.

Answer 2

Try using Application.DisplayAlerts = False to stop the alerts from displaying.

Answer 3

A bit late but it may help someone :

I just face the same issue and I find a way to know more about this error message.

After excel crashes/freeze and display this message, you can go to the Windows Event Viewer (Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Double-click Event Viewer ) to get more details.

In my case (a VSTO addin) I have got an error raised in the Net Runtime that I wasn't able to catch with the debugger. It was related to a System.AccessViolationException and to a call to a native dll.

So have look to the event viewer !