OSIsoft: PI DataLink Ribbon Does Not Appear in Excel. KB00265

After
installing PI DataLink, it's possible that the
PI DataLink ribbon shown up here
will not appear. In this video, we
are going to cover a couple common causes and solutions for this problem. So in the
first case, maybe the PI DataLink add-in is
disabled. This can happen during an Excel crash.
To check, we will look in Excel options
and then add-ins. A healthy PI DataLink
installation will see Excel and the
COM add-in here at the top. If you are
missing the COM add-ins, I'll come down here to the drop down and select
COM add-ins and go. In a healthy DataLink
installation, this box will be present and checked. If your add-in is disabled,
this box will be unchecked. And it will
appear that checking it and hitting OK works, when you come back
in to the COM add-ins, it will be unchecked
again. If that's the case, it's possible that the PI
DataLink COM add-in has been disabled. To check if it has been
disabled, come down here to disabled items this
time and hit go. If PI DataLink appears in this
list, select it and click enable. After
that, you may need to re-add the PI DataLink
in the COM add-ins. And after that, your
ribbon should appear. Another reason why the DataLink
ribbon may not show up is actually
due to an Office 2010 installation
issue. During Office 2010 and only in
Office 2010, an issue may occur during the automatic
setup of the primary interop assemblies.
To see if this issue is currently
affecting you, first verify that the ribbon
is in fact missing.
If you go into the option add-ins, you'll
see no active application
add-ins.
Open up the
control panel, select either programs and
features, or uninstall a
program.
Select Office Professional
Plus 2010. And select the change button at
the top. Don't
select uninstall, but select change. Select add or
remove features,
the top option. Expand out
Microsoft Excel. And you'll see that there is an
X next to .NET programmability
support. Select run from
my computer and hit the
continue button. This will
install the Microsoft primary
interop assemblies for 2010 which come bundled
in the installation kit for Office 2010.
Now
that you've completed the installation
of the primary interop assemblies, you aren't done
yet. Open up Excel. You still don't see the
ribbon. Come into the file, options
menu. Select add-ins.
Select the COM add-ins. Hit
the go button and select the DataLink add-in.
After you've done this, you
should now see the PI ribbon. And it should be
functional.
Another issue that can occur when installing
PI DataLink has to do with the administrative
privileges or the privileges when you actually install the program.
If you don't install it as an administrator,
it will not write the necessary things to the registry
and you won't see the ribbon. First let's open
up Excel and check to see if the
ribbon is there. In our
case, no it is not. So to check to see if this is
an issue that is affecting us, let's open up the start
menu and go to the registry editor. Type
regedit and open
up the registry editor.
The first place we'll look for the key is under
HKeyLocalMachineSoftware.
If you are on a 32 bit machine, just go to Microsoft.
In our case, we are on a 64 bit machine, so we have to go to the
Wow 64 32 node. Expand that down.
Go to Microsoft Office
and scroll down
here. Expand that
out. Office 2010 or
Office 14 if you are using a different version,
use the right number. And then
user settings. And under here we should see something that
starts with a D for DataLink -- and we
don't see that. So we are probably affected by
this problem that we didn't install it with the
necessary permissions. But let's just double check. Let's go to the other place where
we need to see these keys. Let's go to
HKeyCurrentUser.
And under here, let's expand
out Software. And then again
Microsoft and Office.
And then
here it is Excel
and add-ins. We don't see anything listed
under there either. So we are probably affected by
this. We must not have installed with the necessary permissions.
So let's go ahead and get this fixed.
You can either completely reinstall or just do a repair.
If you do reinstall, make sure that when you install, you
right click and say run as administrator.
In our case, we already have it installed. So we are just going
to go to the control panel. Programs or features or
uninstall a program depending on how you have that
listed. And select PI DataLink
2010. Hit the repair button.
And you can see it opens up the
user access control asking
for permissions. Alright, now that we've done the repair, let's go
ahead and open up Excel and
see if the ribbon shows up.
And it does. So it looks good.
Let's just go into the registry and take another look at
what it actually wrote. So again, regedit.

We'll take a look at the each
key local machine first. Again,
it is software
wow 64 32 on a 64 bit machine.
Microsoft Office.
14 for 2010.
And
user settings. And here you
see DataLink all users. So it did get
installed correctly so that's why we see the ribbon
now. Let's go ahead and take a look at what you
should see on your installation
underneath each key local user as well.
Under here it was
software, Microsoft
Office.
And this was in
Excel and add-ins. And here you see the two
add-ins listed. So as long as you see those,
the ribbon should be showing up and you should be good
to go.
If all of the troubleshooting
steps up to this point have not fixed your PI DataLink
ribbon problem, there is additional
troubleshooting that we can do. Select the start menu and
right click on Computer and go to Properties.
This will open up the system pane.
Select advanced system settings
and at the bottom of this window, select
environmental variables. We are
going to be adding a new system variable. That
system variable is
VSTO_SuppressDisplayAlerts
-- All one word.
And
we'll set that to
zero. This will allow us to get additional
logging through Excel when an
error occurs.

Let's open up Excel now and try to enable our add-in.
Go to file,
options, add-ins. Select
the COM add-ins from the dropdown menu and
hit the go button. When we try to enable our PI DataLink
ribbon, we'll get a much more detailed error. By clicking
on the details, we can select this text
and include it an email and send it to tech support
where an engineer can have a much better
chance of solving the problem.