Active-X controls are disabled on Excel 2013 worksheets Excel 2013 in Office 365

Question

Active-X controls are disabled on Excel 2013 worksheets

Excel 2013 in Office 365, running under Win 8.1 fully updated.

All of a sudden the Active-X command buttons in my workbooks don't work. The cursor does not change, and the VBA event handler doesn't fire. But the handlers and all other VBA subs work fine when run from the VB editor. Furthermore, in design mode I cannot insert a new active-x graphic control. Every attempt raises a "Cannot insert object" box when I click on the worksheet to insert the selected control.

I made no changes in Excel Options, and the settings (especially Active-X) are identical to the Excel 2013 settings in my Surface Pro 3 where there is no problem. I ran Office Repair from the Control Panel - didn't change anything. I have not yet run sfc /scannow in a command line.

The only other thing I did at about the same time is to start using OneDrive to a) back up the Excel files, and b) make them readily available on the SurPro3. A file that has this problem on the desktop works OK on the SurPro3.

My Excel applications employ VBA extensively, with many graphic controls on worksheets, so this disabling of Active-X is a real hindrance. I don't use VBA in any other Office apps, so I don't know if the problem is Office-wide or only Excel.

Can anyone suggest a cause and remediation for this problem??

Thanks !!

Explanation / Answer

Hi..

This is probably caused by a bug in the December updates from Microsoft. If you close all of Office and delete all from your user Temp folder that is not in use, the problem should go away.

The user temp folder can be easily accessed by entering

%appdata%..LocalTemp.

in the Windows Explorer address bar..

Windows will replace anything it needs in the temp folder next time it is run.

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