Export to Excel with AX 2012 R2 – Nothing Happens

With the launch of the next latest and greatest version of AX (2012 R2) a few new problems may occur specifically around the integration with MS Office. To give a little bit of background on the subject you should be aware that with the Release of AX 2012 R2, AX now supports Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, SQL Server 2012, Office 2013, Sharepoint 2013, .Net 4.5, and Visual Studio 2010. While these certainly are some great improvements and provides flexibility for AX 2012 to be functional with the newest offerings from Microsoft, there are a couple bugs that still exist.

The one particular bug I wanted to talk about today was the system no longer exporting data from AX to excel. (Please note generating an SSRS report and then exporting to excel works fine, but the actual export of list pages, grids, or tables from AX was not working). Besides the data not being exported to excel there was no error message so it was difficult to try and track down the root cause of the issue or communicate the issue with the AX community. You would see the client “blink” like it was trying to process something and then nothing would happen. The system did not lock up, and was resopnsive however excel never opened and no data appeared.

The environment that was not working was running Windows Server 2008 R2, with MS Office 2010 installed alongside AX 2012 R2. After trying a number of different users, environments, and separate SQL servers nothing was working at all. We also looked at ways to access the virtual machine as well and this was not fixing the error. We did notice that a select few people were able to export to excel but they were running windows 8 and a localized version of AX with Office 2013. We then copied the configuration file to a Windows Server 2012 VM with Office 2013, published the image and suddenly all users were able to export to Excel. This seems to have done the trick and all users are able to export to Excel.

I’m not sure if upgrading to R2 requires Office 2013 (and potentially Windows Server 2012/Windows 8) to use the office add-ins but you should be aware of this in the upgrade process. I know there are a lot of other features in AX 2012 R2 that specifically require Office 2013 but I’m not aware if this is a dependency for the upgrade. If you are reading this and are having issues with the exporting to Excel then try if you can different Operating Systems or try upgrading to Office 2013.