Today, we got a strange error when trying to open a published Excel 2007 Workbook in on Sharepoint with Excel Web Services. The Excel web part returned an error saying "External References (links to other workbooks)" we in the file and could not be opened. The 12 Hive log files had the same error and did not help any further with what the issue could be.
Looking at the file's external links properties in excel showed nothing.
I ended up renaming the xlsx file to a zip, and unzipping the Excel file… scanned the workbook.xml file and found a reference to an “external reference” that did not show up in the Excel interface:
Searching for the unique id in the rest of the zip file, i found it lead to a “Named Range’ that pointed to an external file.
Voila, went back into Excel, removed the Named Range….
Republished the Excel file and it worked.
MS should update the sharepoint error message saying a formula, or named range is referencing an external file. Would have helped.
Cheers
S.
Thanks Sherman, I'll check out the tool. But according to the items it checks, it does not scan for Named Ranges that point to external references. I'll let you know what it comes back with. Thanks so much for the tip...
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