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The Issue:

Recently we came across an issue where someone had inadvertently installed a newer Office 365 version on to their remote desktop server. Yes, I know they shouldn’t be able to but IT consultant’s recommendations are not always followed, and they didn’t have a license for it, so Excel would not work.

What Was Tried:

We were able to uninstall it just fine, run a quick repair on office, and boom! Excel was working again.

A short time later the client brought to our attention that they could not export from excel. Well in some way we figured it was still trying to open the old version of excel which no longer existed.

Removal/reinstallation of excel and QuickBooks resulted in the same problem. Support cases with both QuickBooks and Microsoft fell flat as they pointed fingers at each other.

Google searches resulted in many suggestions like toggling UAC, call QB support, explaining what versions are supported, etc….

Long story short, when uninstalling software sometimes registry keys are orphaned and left behind for one reason or another and they can cause issues.

In this case, a registry key pertaining to the newer version of office was left behind, therefore QuickBooks trying to use the newer version which had been uninstalled.

The Fix:

1. Make sure QuickBooks, Excel, and any other applications using either of those applications are closed.
2. Go to the Registry Editor: Start > Run (type “regedit”) > Click Enter/OK.
3. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00020813-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
4. Upon expanding this you should see more subkeys similar to below.
   • 1.7 for Excel 2010.
   • 1.8 for Excel 2013.
   • 1.9 for Excel 2016
5. Identify the subkey(s) that do not match the version of excel you have installed, and remove the ones that do not apply. In our case we had 1.8 and 1.9, in which I had to remove 1.9. NOTE: For safety sake, right click the registry key {00020813-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} and select export.
6. After making the change you should be able to open excel and your issue should be resolved. In my case, just for good measure, I rebooted the server.

Hope that helps!