You are hereFixing "Excel Cannot Connect to SharePoint List" Error
Fixing "Excel Cannot Connect to SharePoint List" Error
Recently, seemingly at random, our company's SharePoint sites all experienced a serious error when trying to utilize the "Export to Spreadsheet" list functionality. When users would click on "Export to Spreadsheet" everything would seem normal - users would get a prompt asking them to either Open or Save an .iqy file, (assuming you choose Open) Excel would launch, depending on the user's security they would get the macros warning and then ... error. The error reads -
"Excel cannot connect to SharePoint list."
That's pretty much it - no details, no stack trace, no real logging, no event log notification - nothing. With pretty much no information to go on and nothing in our Change Management Log for our SharePoint server farm, I started troubleshooting this issue mainly in the dark. Turning to the search engines, I definitely didn't find much information on this error and even less when taking into account we were running Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3. I tried a few of the fixes I found online with no success. At this point I opened up a case using my MSDN incidents and started working with Microsoft. The MSFT tech had me check some of the basic issues such as what authentication type my site was using (Kerberos vs. NTLM), some user permissions, SQL security, etc. However, he finally found the issue when we opened up the web.config file located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI. In this web.config file, there was the following entry -
<add
type="Microsoft.Web.Services2.WebServicesExtension,Microsoft.Web.Services2,Version=2
.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" priority="1" group="0" />
</soapExtensionTypes>
According to the MSFT tech, this entry is due to the fact that at some point Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 was installed on the server (although, I really have no recollection of this ever occurring - maybe this was done through a patch?). By removing this line from the web.config specified above and performing an iisreset /noforce, I then tried exporting to Excel and the functionality was restored. Hopefully, if you are encountering this article, I can save you a support call to Microsoft.
Hi from Turkey!
I want to thank you for this awsome aritcle.
I had faced similar problem. I think this problem comes from Soap. I had removed all the soapExtensionTypes lines from web.config file and now it's woking fine.
Thanks a lot :))
Very best regards!
Glad I could help and happy to hear your problem is resolved!
Very hopeful article but...
I have just the same problem exceptionally on Win7 and some Vista but not XP. So I've found that web.config but there is not same entry. There is only entry is including and some . Thats all.
Has you any idea?
Sorry the article didn't resolve your issue. However, it sounds like your problem is different than mine. For one, I didn't see differing results based on client operating system. I was receiving the error on all operating systems with all versions of Microsoft Office.
There are a few issues I can think of and they all relate to security. Windows Vista, and more so, Windows 7 implement much more stringent security models. Are you getting this error on your internal network or only from remote locations? I would also check firewall settings, proxy settings (if applicable), etc. This almost definitely sounds security related.