posted on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 3:33 PM
by
davidboschmans
An Offline Work List in Excel
Creating an offline work list in Microsoft Excel from Team Foundation Server is relatively easy. However lately I've had some customers using the VPC of the MSDN Subscriber Downloads complaining about an error. The error message box that pops up says "TF84041: Microsoft Office does not have the language pack installed …".
Well the good news is that it's a known issue with the VPC (and other VPCs), the bad that it's not solved yet in the VPC. Hopefully it will be solved in the next VPC (Visual Studio 2005 RTM + TFS Beta 3 Refresh) that will be released in the next couple of weeks.
There are two possible solutions:
- install the MUI pack in order to get this working in Beta 3. It's caused by an unfortunate Excel bug to do with some of the APIs we use not correctly passing Locale IDs.
- create a '1033' directory under <program files>\microsoft office\office11 (if it doesn't already exist). Copy Excel.exe into the 1033 directory and rename it to xllex.dll.
The steps to create an an Offline Work List goes than as follows:
- Open Microsoft Excel from the Start Menu
- Microsoft Excel, from the Work Items menu, select New List
- In the “Connect to Team Foundation Server” dialog, select VSTSRC1 from the drop-down
- Make sure AdventureWorks is selected in the “Team projects” list and click OK
- Select the Work Items tab
- Select Query
- From the query dropdown, select My Work Items
- Click Run
- Click OK
- Create a new folder on the hard drive: C:\MyFolder
- Save your Excel workbook as C:\MyFolder\MyTasks.xls
- Close Excel
- Close Visual Studio
The integration of Team Foundation Server with Microsoft Project and Microsoft Office applications allows project managers to use the tools they already know and like to immediately start taking advantage of Team Foundation Server features like Work Item Tracking. This completely eliminates the learning curve associated with the adoption of new tools.