Hi,
One of our users is getting the following error in Jet:
Microsoft Office Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action.
Happens intermittantly. Licence issue?
Any help welcome.
Thanks.
Date
Votes
15 comments
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Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi,
Nope, it's not a license issue. This is actually a strange thing that Excel does occasionally to certain users. It doesn't seem to happen to most users, but seems to happen repeatedly to certain users. Basically Excel is waiting for something in an add-in to complete (a.k.a. Jet Reports) and Excel is getting impatient and informing the user that it's still waiting. This could happen if they are running a report which is running a single query which takes a long time to complete (i.e. getting a lot of data from a very large table, etc.).
This happened in older versions of Excel much more often than it does in newer versions. When it starts happening, really the only thing you can do is hit OK (sometimes multiple times) and wait for it to complete. Jet will complete eventually; you don't have to kill Excel and start over. It's an Excel issue and there's really nothing Jet itself can do to make it not happen that we know of. As I said, it did happen in older versions of Excel much more often so upgrading Excel may help, although I have no reason to believe it can't happen in newer versions as well. It just seems to happen to some users more often than others for some reason, but we've never been able to figure out why. I hope that helps as an explanation of the problem. Sorry I can't be more helpful.
Regards,
Hughes -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi,
I'm working on Excel 2010 and the problem still happens regularly but not reproducable. It also happens after cancelling a report or the calculation after entering a formula.
And I don't feel like it's only happening by getting a lot of data from a large table.
I would like to ask another question even if it's not quite on topic:
Are there any known performance issues between Office Standard and Office Professional in Design Mode?
NL("Rows";"Company";"Name of Company";"Data Source=";"ABC";"Short Name";"A*") takes much more time to show the first company with Office Professional than with Office Standard.
Running the report doesn't make any performance differences.
I don't know if Office is the real problem but as far I havn't found any other differences (same JetReports-version, same Nav-client and cfront.dll, same os).
cat -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi Cat,
As I said, it happened more often in older versions of Excel, but as you have noted, it can happen in newer versions as well.
There are no differences I know of between different editions of the same version of Office. Assuming they are both the same major version of Office (2010, 2007, 2003, etc.), Professional and Standard should be exactly the same as far as I know. Of course the only way to create a test where you can be truly sure the only difference is the Office edition would be to install one edition on a computer, run some reports and get exact times, then uninstall Office and install the other edition on the same computer and run the exact same reports and get the exact times for comparison.
Different computers may appear to be the same, but there are always differences. For example, there are also some Jet settings which affect performance (preserving page breaks, NF function optimization, and preserving conditional formatting for Excel 2010 come to mind). There are also Excel settings which affect performance such as enabling multi-threaded calculation (Jet actually performs better if this setting is disabled which is very counter intuitive). I hope this helps. If you do decide to run some performance tests with different Office editions on the exact same machine, I would be interested to know what you find.
Regards,
Hughes -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi Hughes,
Thanks for your reply.
The problem is that running the report doesn't make any measurably difference, but evaluating the formula for the first time seems the problem.
At the moment it's not possible to test the different Office editions on the exact same machine, but there could be a chance to do that in the next two weeks. I'll let you know.
cat -
Rob Fontaine I'm running Excel 2016 on Windows 10 and always the latest release of Jet Professional. This error message started popping up for me about 6 months ago and now it occurs constantly. I have searched all over the web and in various forums trying to find a solution but so far nothing has worked. I reinstalled Office on my computer and when that didn't work I had our IT department swap my old computer for a new one with clean install of everything, and the error still persists. The only way I can get rid of the error is to disable the Jet add-in. I'm wondering if over the years anyone has come across any updated information on this or possible solutions. It's extremely frustrating when running large reports to find out after running for 20-30 minutes that Excel is completely frozen up and the only way to resolve it is to kill the process in Task Manager and lose everything.
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Ben Dyson Hi Rob and all
We have a customer with the same issue hence I'm researching. Rob, is 20-30 minutes normal for the report? If so then the Jet Sceduler and running it out of hours might well be the best option. Or further to that, if you data source is on a server separate to you, can you install Excel on that server and see if you get the issues from there. Maybe part of the cause is networking? Running the same report on the same machine as the datasource would rule that out.
In the meantime, if anyone does have a better solution, or Jet come across some sort of better handshaking method or protocol to retrieve a lost thread back to running. Please let me know.
Regards
Ben Dyson
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Rob Fontaine Hi Ben,
Thank you for replying to my post. Regarding the report run-time, I should have been more clear on the scenario.
The 'waiting for OLE action' message doesn't appear during the actual Jet refresh, it appears randomly when Excel is idle including when a workbook has been just opened or later on after I have been working on it for a while and/or after a Jet refresh has completed. Some of our reports only take a few minutes and some take 20-30, but the error occurs for all of these workbooks regardless, and it also occurs when I have workbooks open which do not even contain any Jet formulas. However, when I disable the Jet add-in the error no longer occurs at all for any workbooks, which makes me think it is not a pure Microsoft or Excel issue.
The only way for me to unfreeze Excel when the error occurs is to end the running task in the Task Manager. When I do this, I have to end the Excel task under the 'Apps' list, but then there is also always what appears to be an orphaned Excel task running under 'Background processes' in Task Manager that remains and which I also have to end for everything to go back to normal. I'm wondering if this background process is somehow related to the 'OLE' error?
Rob
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Patrick O'Dea We are having the same issue with windows 10 and office 2016. same symptoms exactly as you described even the random crash while idle.
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Harry Lewis I used to see this error, occasionally (especially with older versions of Excel) - although not in conjunction with the Jet add-in. This is one of those Excel error messages that is so frustrating because, once the issue occurs, there is no way to tell Excel to cancel what it is trying to do.
A few years ago, it was found that Excel could experience an issue if Jet calculations are "cancelled" - especially during the saving of the Excel workbook.
In that situation, it is very important that you allow Excel and Jet to complete the recalculation of the workbook during the save process. By cancelling, Excel can fail to release its lock upon certain components and, when it then attempts to proceed, encounter an issue when it next attempts to access those same components.
If you have specific steps which cause the issue to occur, you'll want to share that information with Jet Reports Technical Support. If the cause can be documented, it is entirely possible that a solution could be found.
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Steve Horth We are having the same issues as outlined above by Rob Fontaine. Granted, this is the same error message one would get if running a resource-intensive formula (like those in MATLAB), but that is not the case here.
The 'waiting for OLE action' message appears randomly and after a few minutes of Excel unresponsiveness - sometimes when Excel is idle, sometimes after a Jet refresh has completed, sometimes in Design mode, sometimes not, sometimes immediately on opening a file. The file can be local or networked. Every Jet developer here experiences this.
There are days when Excel behaves nicely, others when we can't get work done for more than a few minutes before it locks up.
The symptoms are 1) the user cannot move to another cell or do any other Excel work, 2) a few minutes pass by before the OLE error message appears - clearing the message leaves us with a still-locked app.
This problem is impossible to reproduce on demand. There are no specific steps taken that will force this to happen. Like I said, occasionally there are days when it doesn't happen at all.
The only way for me to unfreeze Excel when the error occurs is to end Excel in the Task Manager. The only sure way to prevent the problem is to disable the Jet add-in entirely (which is, of course, counter-productive).
We've taken a fresh bare-bones machine with all Windows updates, installed Excel 2016 and the latest Jet, no other OLE sources (that we know of). Open a spreadsheet and wait. Sometimes nothing, sometimes frozen. The frustration level is profound here - we want to use Jet but this is ridiculous. We save our work every minute or so out of fear we will lose our work at any moment.
Please help with this.
PS - Rebooting doesn't help.
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Harry Lewis Hello Steve -
I would suggest opening a conversation with Jet Reports Support - they may have newer information about how such a situation can be addressed.
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Linda Allen We are also having the same issues outlined by Rob Fontaine and Steve Horth. Has there been any resolutions found for this issue?
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Steve Horth Hi Linda,
We opened a support ticket with Jet. We gave them RD access to one of our PCs, where they could play around and see the issue for themselves. Once they saw it they installed a debug version of Jet that left a verbose log file describing the inner workings just prior to the freeze up. Once they had that data they made changes to the Jet product and installed it. We've since noticed that MOST of the time Jet behaves now, but does occasionally freeze up (maybe 5 or 10 percent as often). That is a much better result and we consider the issue closed, as long as Jet continues to behave. BTW we didn't have to change anything else on our PCs, so we conclude the fault was entirely the Jet product. Having said that, our experience with the folks at Jet was positive overall, albeit quite lengthy.
We are using Jet Pro 2018 18.0.17321.0 64-bit.
Good luck!
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Tommy Mortensen Hi
We also have the same issue with the frequently freeze, and the Ole error pop up outlined by Steve Horth
The error only occours when Excel have a open Jet report, the error will appear whitout any task for the user, just a open excel file containing a jet report.
Is there any action / explanation taken from JetSupport in ordre to solve this issue ?
Br/ Tommy
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Cynthia C.N Hello all,
I would recommend upgrading Jet to the latest release as this issue was addressed.
You can find the latest release of Jet Professional here:
Cheers
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