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Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action.

Article ID: 2663513 - View products that this article applies to.

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Symptoms

When you open or use a Microsoft Excel workbook, you may receive this error message:

Microsoft Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action.

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Cause

This error can occur for one of the following reasons:

You try to use the Send as Attachment option in Excel.
You try to open an embedded object in Excel.
The Excel worksheet tries to access data from another application that is still active.

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We recommend that you follow the provided methods in this article in order. However, if you had previously tried one of the methods and it did not help, you can jump to another method quickly from this list:

Method 1: Use a different method to attach the Excel workbook
Method 2: Close the application that interacts with Excel
Method 3: Troubleshoot add-ins in Excel

More information

The information provided in this section is for advanced users.

If you created a workbook that is automating another application through VBA, you can add this line of code to turn off the message:

Application.DisplayAlerts = False

Note: This line of code needs to be included in the code that is doing the automation prior to calling the line of code that results in the error occurring.

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