I'm using Microsoft's DSOFramer control to allow me to embed an Excel file in my dialog so the user can choose his sheet, then select his range of cells; it's used with an import button on my dialog.

The problem is that when I call the DSOFramer's OPEN function, if I have Excel open in another window, it closes the Excel document (but leaves Excel running). If the document it tries to close has unsaved data, I get a dialog boxclosing Excel doc in another window. If unsaved data in file, dsoframer fails to open with a messagebox: "Attempt to access invalid address".

I built the source, and stepped through, and its making a call in its CDsoDocObject::CreateFromFile function, calling BindToObject on an object of class IMoniker. The HR is 0x8001010a "The message filter indicated that the application is busy". On that failure, it tries to InstantiateDocObjectServer by classid of CLSID Microsoft Excel Worksheet... this fails with an HRESULT of 0x80040154 "Class not registered". The InstantiateDocObjectServer just calls CoCreateInstance on the classid, first with CLSCTX_LOCAL_SERVER, then (if that fails) with CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER.

I know DSOFramer is a popular sample project for embedding Office apps in various dialogs and forms. I'm hoping someone else has had this problem and might have some insight on how I can solve this. I really don't want it to close any other open Excel documents, and I really don't want it to error-out if it can't close the document due to unsaved data.

Update 1: I've tried changing the classid that's passed in to "Excel.Application" (I know that class will resolve), but that didn't work. In CDsoDocObject, it tries to open key "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID{00024500-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\DocObject", but fails. I've visually confirmed that the key is not present in my registry; The key is present for the guid, but there's no DocObject subkey. It then produces an error message box: "The associated COM server does not support ActiveX document embedding". I get similar (different key, of course) results when I try to use the Excel.Workbook programid.

Update 2: I tried starting a 2nd instance of Excel, hoping that my automation would bind to it (being the most recently invoked) instead of the problem Excel instance, but it didn't seem to do that. Results were the same. My problem seems to have boiled down to this: I'm calling the BindToObject on an object of class IMoniker, and receiving 0x8001010A (RPC_E_SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER) "The message filter indicated that the application is busy". I've tried playing with the flags passed to the BindToObject (via the SetBindOptions), but nothing seems to make any difference.

Update 3: It first tries to bind using an IMoniker class. If that fails, it calls CoCreateInstance for the clsid as a "fallback" method. This may work for other MS Office objects, but when it's Excel, the class is for the Worksheet. I modified the sample to CoCreateInstance _Application, then got the workbooks, then called the Workbooks::Open for the target file, which returns a Worksheet object. I then returned that pointer and merged back with the original sample code path. All working now.