Problem:

Once more problems with MS Excel. This time refreshing web queries (which worked for quite a time without a problem) made my Excel application crash with 100% reliability. Not a nice thing when you want to update a lot of financial data at once (wouldn’t think of doing it manually).

Solution:

First I thought my spreadsheet got corrupted someway. But in fact this one would have been easy to solve if I hadn’t been that stubborn. Having tried recreating queries and some other stuff, I finally sent the crash report to Microsoft (a thing I don’t do most of the time in fact) – and the important part goes here, for the very first time I got a message like “click here to find a solution to your problem”. Whoa, did they improve the crash reporting and diagnostic tools that much since I last used them? It said something about HP printer driver being the faulty part – and the normal stuff about consulting HP customer service for additional support. Sure I wouldn’t, tried that once with nVIDIA – got the impression they’re doing a “last man standing” competition (yeah, I gave up after some 2 months). But it gave me a hint as what to look for. And it was a good one. I use an IPP printer server, which has been turned off lately due to some huge storms in the neighbourhood. It was quite normal I would get some timeouts and problems when trying to convert documents, print preview them and the like (which I got once already when I forgot to turn it on), but I didn’t think it could influence the web queries. In fact it does. Now I know it for sure. Switched on, print server available – Excel works without a glitch.