Software: Excel Add-In Not Loading? Try this...

I’ve been playing around with Excel Add-ins and I have had quite the frustrating last 5 hours. I put some code into my Connect class that caused the add-in to throw an exception. This caused Excel put up a message box telling me that the add-in was not playing nice and should it be removed from the list? I thought I said “No”. I certainly did something wrong because after that fun little message my add-in stopped coming up. Great. So 5 hours later, being unable to find anything via Google, it suddenly struck me that I should just create another add-in project and see what was different. That did it. So you don’t have to waste time if you run into this. Add the following code to your registry:

Under KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\Office\Excel\AddIns\MyAddIn.Connect add the following values:

String value: Description "MyAddIn rocks!’
String value: FriendlyName “MyAddIn”
DWORD value: LoadBehavior 0x00000003

This got me back to my original development settings. Oh the Joy of it all! (that is sarcasm)