DATALINK causing a fatal error

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I'm using AutoCAD MEP 2016, and having a problem getting datalinks to work. I've done this a lot in the past, and it has worked great, but for some reason I've not been able to get things to keep from crashing.

Here's the process:

1. Create new drawing, or open existing

2. Command: TABLE

3. Select "From a data link", click button to launch the data link manager dialog

4. Click "Create a new Excel Data Link" from tree view

5. Enter any name for the new data link, click OK

6. Click [...] button next to Browse for a file ...

7. Select a .xlsx file, click Open

8. Microsoft Excel dialog tries to find solutions to the problem (as to why Excel crashed, my guess is while trying to read the file). It's one of those Windows "Looking for solutions" dialog that pops up for a while and never does anything.

9. AutoCAD dialog: The specified Excel file is not valid or supported. Only Excel 2000, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007 file formats are supported. You will need to save the Excel file into one of these formats.

---Note: The file is totally valid, saved in Excel 2010 in the standard .xlsx format that has been compatible thus far.

10. Click Close on that dialog.

11. Click Cancel on the New Excel Data Link dialog.

12. Receive AutoCAD Error Aborting Dialog: FATAL ERROR: Unhandled e06d7363h Exception at eff1f28h

13. Submitted error report.

For reference, the error report number is CER_129988930, if someone from Autodesk sees this.

Anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this?

Thanks!

[Victoria.Studley]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thank you for posting your question here in the community. It's great to see you're using Screencast!

I tested AutoCAD MEP 2016 here on my machine with a simple Excel spreadsheet created and saved in Excel 2010, using the same process outlined in your Screencast, and the datalink was created and inserted successfully.

Do you have any customization applied? Lisp routines that run?

Do you have the 64-bit or 32-bit version of Excel installed?

And which bit version of MEP 2016?

Does this happen with all Excel files, or only some?

All drawing files, or only some?

As a test, if you create a new Excel spreadsheet with only a couple of simple cells, and a new drawing from an out-of-the-box template in MEP 2016, does the program still crash every time you try to create a datalink?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply!

I'm using the following AutoCAD Version:

Product Version: 7.8.106.0 AutoCAD MEP 2016 SP1

Built On: 7.8.106.0 AutoCAD Architecture 2016 SP1

M.49.0.0 AutoCAD 2016

And I'm fairly certain it's 64-bit, given that it launches from "Program Files", not "Program Files (x86)".

Excel is the following:

Version: 14.0.7166.5000 (64-bit)

Also, attached is an attempt at inserting a table with a datalink on the most vanilla setup I can think of getting to... does the error report in the original post reveal anything?

Thanks!

[Victoria.Studley]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thank you for elaborating. The only thing I could confirm from the error report was that the program is indeed crashing on the datalink module.

Since this is clearly, from your Screencast, happening with all Excel spreadsheets and all drawing files, I'd like you to try repairing the AutoCAD MEP installation.

If the problem still persists after you do that, I'd recommend running a repair on your Microsoft Excel / Office program(s) as well.

[Anonymous]

I know this is a few months old but did you ever figure out the problem?  I'm having the same issue.  All of my datalinks to one excel file have worked just fine and then they quit working.  They began giving me the same error message in all the subsequent files but the data that was loaded into the previous files also quit linking to the spreadsheet.

[jrobinson]

Same thing for me as well. Exact same thing happens under standard AutoCAD 2016 using Excel 2010. I even tried to back save the Excel XLSX to an Excel 2003 XLS version, same thing happens, just crashes AutoCAD.

Any workaround for this yet?

[Anonymous]

The same at Brazil! Not working yet... =(

Excel 2016 64 bits + AutoCAD 2017 64 bits. Datalink crashs the AutoCAD and close all.