Excel Starter and Inventor

In the Inventor 2012 System Requirements, we can read this concerning Excel:

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Microsoft® Excel 2003 through 2010 for iFeatures, iParts, iAssemblies, thread customization, and spreadsheet-driven designs

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There is however one exception to this system requirements paragraph that is not mentioned explicitly and we just found out about this exception via one of our beta testers: the free Microsoft product called "Microsoft Excel Starter" cannot be used with Inventor as a replacement for the full Microsoft Excel (which is of course not free).

The explanation is relatively simple.

Microsoft Excel Starter comes with the OEM version of  Microsoft Office 2010 (named Office Starter 2010) and gets installed as a "virtual application".

Because of this, the app does not register itself in the Windows registry.

And this means that Inventor cannot find Microsoft Excel Starter via the Windows registry and thus iParts/iAssemblies, iFeatures and threads will not function properly with Inventor.
You will have to upgrade to the full Excel product to make things work.

Conclusion: there is no free iLunch.

 

Comments

[excel development]

Thanks for the post. Anyway, I am using Microsoft excel starter for a class project and I need help with how do I start a new line?
Like I wrote a sentence and now i need to write another sentence right below it but in the same box but every time I hit enter it moves down one. How do I keep it in the same box or can't I? Thanks in advance!

[Bob Van der Donck]

Hold down the ALT key + hit the ENTER key.
That shoudl give you a second line of text in a single Excel cell.
Bob

[andrew]

Why won't Autodesk use delimited text files for parameters instead of forcing use of excel? It seems unnecessary.