Wednesday, July 15, 2009

"TF84037: There was a problem initializing the Microsoft Excel Team Foundation AddIn"

We seem to have a number of people who get the error "TF84037: There was a problem initializing the Microsoft Excel Team Foundation AddIn. Re-installing the Team Foundation Client may be required." Which usually boils down to the user not having .NET Programmability Support enabled on their Office installation. Here are some plagiarized instructions I stole from someone else who I can't remember who. Thanks to whoever I took these from.

It looks like Office 2007 .Net programmability support is not installed. You need to modify your installed version of Office and install this option. I thought we had a better error message for this...
1. In Add/Remove programs, locate your Office application and select it.
2. Click on the 'Change' button
3. Select 'Add or Remove features' and click 'next'
4. Select 'Choose advanced customization of applications' and click 'next' OR select something like 'Add .Net programmability support'.
5. In the tree view, expand 'Microsoft Office Excel' and make sure the .NET Programmability Support option is set to 'run from my computer'.
6. Click 'update'.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello,
.NET programmability support is a prereq for running the TFS office add-in, but the error message is pretty misleading. In TFS 2010 Beta2, we have a more helpful message here.
Thanks.
Mareen [MSFT-TFS]

docrams said...

I have followed the steps as mentioned but I have a new error, TF84034: Team Foundation was unable to Initialize the workbook, This documnet will no longer be assosiciated with a Team Foundation server.

Thanks