Why can’t I create an Excel VSTO workbook project in Visual Studio 2010

excel-2010visual studio 2010vsto

I try to create an Excel 2010 workbook project in Visual studio. I go into Visual Studio and Choose new project and choose Excel 2010 Workbook and then i just get a pop up that says "The project cannot be created" with no other info

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any suggestions why VS 2010 is not letting me create an Excel workbook project? (It does create an Excel addin project fine). This error message above is not very helpful. Given that the error message is not very helpful is there anyway to debug to get more information that would make this question easier to answer

Best Answer

I got a similar error - in order to fix it, while in Excel I went to Options -> Add-ins -> Manage Excel Add-ins -> Automation -> and Selected "Visual Studio Tools for Office Design-Time Adaptor for Excel". Then restart Excel and (if you had the same issue) you should be good to go.

Related Solutions

C# – VSTO problem – cannot create visual studio excel workbook project

Just in case you haven't checked the trust settings, this MSDN page describes how to.

I came across this on a MSDN forum:

For the repair to work, you'll have to run the VS Command Prompt with Admin Priviledges (right click, run as administrator). Then run this command line:

C:>AddinUtil -AddInRoot:"%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\VSTA\AppInfoDocument" -Rebuild

If it still doesn't work, you may also have a corrupt pipleline store, which can be fixed like this:

C:>AddinUtil -PipelineRoot:"%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\VSTA\Pipeline" -Rebuild

You'll get one warning from that command but that is expected.

Failing that, I think you will have to run a repair on the Visual Studio 2008 installation (put the installation DVD in a drive, and select the repair option).

Visual-studio – Visual Studio 2010 always thinks project is out of date, but nothing has changed

For Visual Studio/Express 2010 only. See other (easier) answers for VS2012, VS2013, etc

To find the missing file(s), use info from the article Enable C++ project system logging to enable debug logging in Visual Studio and let it just tell you what's causing the rebuild:

Open the devenv.exe.config file (found in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ or in %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\). For Express versions the config file is named V*Express.exe.config.

Add the following after the </configSections> line:

<system.diagnostics>
  <switches>
    <add name="CPS" value="4" />
  </switches>
</system.diagnostics>

Restart Visual Studio
Open up DbgView and make sure it's capturing debug output
Try to debug (hit F5 in Visual Studio)
Search the debug log for any lines of the form:

devenv.exe Information: 0 : Project 'Bla\Bla\Dummy.vcxproj' not up to date because build input 'Bla\Bla\SomeFile.h' is missing.

(I just hit Ctrl+F and searched for not up to date) These will be the references causing the project to be perpetually "out of date".

To correct this, either remove any references to the missing files from your project, or update the references to indicate their actual locations.

Note: If using 2012 or later then the snippet should be:

<system.diagnostics>
  <switches>
   <add name="CPS" value="Verbose" />
  </switches>
</system.diagnostics>

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Related Solutions

C# – VSTO problem – cannot create visual studio excel workbook project

Visual-studio – Visual Studio 2010 always thinks project is out of date, but nothing has changed

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