I had deployed WSS at a customer site, and they were really enjoying it, making particular use of the Datasheet view of lists, which they used as a sort of shared spreadsheet.  Then, suddenly, one day it stopped working everywhere, on every machine.  What would happen when you tried to view any list in Datasheet view is a quick redirect to Standard View, with a message at the bottom that said:

"The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed, your browser does not support Active X controls, or support for ActiveX controls is disabled  in http://<website>."

I Googled and researched and experimented but did not find any answers to my problems. 

Here are the salient details:

1. The server hosting WSS is a domain controller, and no office components are installed on it.
2. The workstations are all running Office 2003 Standard (Excel and Word, no MS Access)
3. Shortly before this happened, I had attempted to create a GPO to add the WSS site to all users' Trusted Sites,so they wouldn't be nagged for a login.  I don't think it worked correctly.  I am mentioning this not becaause I now think it caused the problem, but because I chased it for so long as a possible culprit.
4. This issue appears to have begun affecting all workstations at the same time.
5. No error appears in any event log or WSS log.

I opened a Microsoft case on it, and they isolated the problem to the client, and not the server (as I had assumed).  I had been leaning toward the server as the source of the problem; how else could it have affected all workstations at once?  But it turns out that the Datasheet view uses a library called STSLIST.DLL, which is actually a Microsoft Access component for SharePoint (and not Excel, as I had thought).  But you shouldn't need MS Access to be able to use STSLIST.  They had me try a bunch of different fixes, including:

1. Repairing/reinstalling Office 2003. No joy.
2. Installing/Re-applying Office 2003 SP2 (no joy)
3. Downloading and registering a new version of STSLIST.DLL (11.0.8200.0), no joy.
4. Installing or upgrading to Office 2007, any edition: SUCCESS.

Yes, installing Office 2007 solved the problem on any workstation we put it on.  However, the customer balked at being forced to upgrade all her workstations, since Office 2007 is expensive.  WSS should not require Office 2007.  Remember Good, Better, Best?  There ought to be a way to make it work with Office 2003, like it was working originally.  Microsoft agreed.  But since we had a viable (albeit expensive) solution, and the fact that the lists could be edited in Standard View, the case was deprioritized to "pure research".

Finally, the MS engineer got back to me and said he had seen this problem occurring at several other sites, and that it was now a known issue.  They have apparently come up with a fix for this, in the form of a public hotfix, which you can download here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;949670

The KB article does not mention my specific problem but the MS engineer said what was happening is that, when Office 2003 and 2007 components are installed side by side on the same workstation, the WSS libraries were pointing to the wrong Office libraries.  So this fix is supposed to take care of it.

I have not had the time to test this out, but I thought I'd post it here anyway in case some of you were seeing the same issue elsewhere.  I'll know by the end of the week if this is the answer to my problems.

 

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Posted 04-14-2008 7:27 AM by moffitar