Inventor Crash on opening file - cause: Excel EULA

[golub1]

Just thought I would mention a rather humorous solution to a frustration I ran into this morning, in the hope that it might help someone else...

I bought a new comp a few months ago to run Inventor on. So far my needs for MS Office on that comp were relatively small and I haven't graduated to a skill level that requires tables in Inventor yet, so I have just been using Open Office. Seems to do everything I needed so why waste the licensing fee for yet another computer, right?

Well yesterday I wanted to drop a manufacturer's bearing block into a model I was working on, and you guessed it, despite having the spreadsheet abilities of Open Office available to it, Inventor plain refused to let me work with the file like I could on a workstation that has Excel. Fortunately Inventor gave me a clear error message so I knew that the problem was due to not having Excel.

Well, gritting my teeth in disgust, I gave in and submitted to giving Bill yet some more of my hard earned money and installed a copy of MS Office on this new computer at the end of the work day.

This morning I did the MS updates to it and went to work on my Inventor model, but Inventor crashed as soon as I tried to open the file. Tried rebooting. Tried opening a sub-assembly, crash. Tried opening a single IPT, crash. No error message, no results from submitting the crash report. Just plain refused to open any files, even ones from other projects.

Then it dawned on me that I had not actually run Excel yet and that one of the first things that happens on the first instance of a new user running one of the MS Office modules is that you have to yet again accept the EULA... started up Excel, clicked the accept button, retried Inventor and boom, its all working perfectly...

So bottom line, if you've recently installed Excel and Inventor suddenly refuses to load your files, make sure to actually run Excel at least once and clear that darn EULA box! LOL.

Cheers,
Shawn (Inventor noob... but learning)

[dh80]

Thank you vey much golub1!!!

You saved my day.

Robb78

[kstate92]

It really is a shame there is no FOSS option for Inventor, but I'm sure they don't have the resources (nor sadly the demand) to link with Libre Office (avoid OO now that Ellison has his filthy, craven claws into it).  Having said that, I can see the EU Competition folks someday asking very tough questions about the near-incestuous relationship between Inventor (Autodesk) and Excel (Microsoft).  Oh, I know: you don't *have* to use Excel to use Inventor; only if you want to use Inventor effectively.  Talk about a thousand lawyers dancing on the head of a pin (and who would know more about pinheads than lawyers?).