Send to Excel without opening a new Excel instance

[StefanoC]

Send to Excel without opening a new Excel instance.
Having changed from EG 7.12 to 7.15 we have encountered a small problem.

In 7.12, when we used the menu option "send to Excel", it used to open the spreadsheets in the same, active instance.
In 7.15 we get new instances of excel everytime we send to excel.

Are there any ways to change this?

/Ste

[Damo]

Hi @StefanoC

Are you saying that prior to your upgrade, you were sending information from EG to an opened/active spreadsheet?

Are you sending SAS datasets?

I tried with few different versions and it is sending each attempts to a new instance of Excel.

Cheers,
Damo

[StefanoC]

Thanks for your reply.

Yes. Unfortunately that is exactly what I mean.
I'm sending a SAS dataset using the sas menu option send to excel

Prior to the upgrade everything worked as wanted by the end users.
I.e the output landed in a new workbook in the same excel instance.

After the upgrade the output ends up in a new instance of excel.

Nothing else has changed.

I only have one computer that still have 7.12 installed.

I have contacted SAS Support, but I would love a quick answer.

/Ste

[ChrisHemedinger]

As far as I know it always has created a new instance...but it might be controlled partly by Windows shell open settings for Excel.  The difference might also be triggered by whether you have the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office installed (with same bitness as EG).

[CaseySmith · Accepted solution]

This was an intentional change. Prior to EG 7.12, we always created a new Excel instance for sending data to Excel. Starting in EG 7.12, we started re-using the existing Excel instance, if one was open. However, a problem that resulted from re-using the existing Excel instance was reported...  specifically, if you edit any Excel cell while data is being sent to Excel an error occurs that interrupts the send-to processing. There was not a good solution, so we reverted the behavior in EG 7.13 (and 7.12 HF5) back to always creating a new Excel instance.

Casey

[StefanoC]

Thank you for explaining it all.
That matches exactly the behavior we have with current and prior versions.
/Ste