2014-05-23

We have been playing with Excel and Visio and everything was working fine when until a few users started to get errors when trying to add a new Excel or Visio web part to a page.

Excel

Couldn’t Open the Workbook.  The workbook cannot be opened.

Visio

The document can’t be opened because it is not a supported Visio diagram.  Make sure that the “Web Drawing URL” web part setting is set to a valid VSDX, VSDM or VDW file.

We checked the usual suspects such as library and file permissions and made sure the files were the right format and not corrupt.  Everything checked out, it was a bit of a head scratcher.

We had the users show us the steps they took.  The user added the web part to a page and copied the URL from the file into the right field in the web part options.  

The user got the URL by opening the library, clicking the ellipsis next to the library item and coping the URL from the properties dialog. 

Copying the URL into the address field of a new web page worked so we knew the URL was good.  While testing we noticed the URL format:

https://myurl.com/sites/SiteName/Shared%20Documents/Drawing1.vsdx?Web=1

The ?Web=1 was puzzling.  We removed it from the end of the URL and tested the Excel and Visio webparts with the URL.  Both web parts worked fine.

So if you run into these mysterious errors check the URL and remove ?Web=1 from the end.

About the author 

Marc Dayton