A
Amy
SFEcon is website that stages MSWord and Excel documents
for download. These documents contain links back to the
site allowing our correspondents to view web pages that
explain things in the documents.
We recently upgraded our operation with a new P4 computer,
and find Excel behaving strangely in that clicking on a
link in one of our spreadsheets yields the following
error:
Microsoft Excel
"Unable to open http://www.sfecon.com/GEP.htm. Cannot
locate the internet server or proxy server."
The problem does NOT occur with links embedded in MSWord
documents.
We are able to isolate the error further by comparing two
systems. Using the same spreadsheet, the problem does not
occur on an older P3 computer running Office 2000 under
WinXP Pro. The P4 computer that has this problem is
running Office 2000 under WinXP Home. Both systems have
updated editions of Office; they both access the net
through the same residential gateway that connects to a
single co-ax modem. Both systems use the same "History
Killer" software that destroys cookies and empties the
browser's history. The P3 is protected by Symantec, the
P4 by McAfee. Disabling this software has no effect on
the problem.
The situation is even more mysterious in the following
particular. We can avoid the problem on our P4 machine IF
we go to the browser first, view the destination page for
a given link, move on to some other page, and then click
the link in the spreadsheet - which takes us back to the
page we want. If we close and re-open Excel, the link
again fails to work. On the P4 machine, Excel can only
find a page that is in the cache of an open browser, or
that it has already visited in the current session. But,
on the P3 machine, Excel has whatever it takes to open the
browser and find the correct web page.
Seems like we need to know something about browser and
Excel settings. This fault is mission critical for us.
for download. These documents contain links back to the
site allowing our correspondents to view web pages that
explain things in the documents.
We recently upgraded our operation with a new P4 computer,
and find Excel behaving strangely in that clicking on a
link in one of our spreadsheets yields the following
error:
Microsoft Excel
"Unable to open http://www.sfecon.com/GEP.htm. Cannot
locate the internet server or proxy server."
The problem does NOT occur with links embedded in MSWord
documents.
We are able to isolate the error further by comparing two
systems. Using the same spreadsheet, the problem does not
occur on an older P3 computer running Office 2000 under
WinXP Pro. The P4 computer that has this problem is
running Office 2000 under WinXP Home. Both systems have
updated editions of Office; they both access the net
through the same residential gateway that connects to a
single co-ax modem. Both systems use the same "History
Killer" software that destroys cookies and empties the
browser's history. The P3 is protected by Symantec, the
P4 by McAfee. Disabling this software has no effect on
the problem.
The situation is even more mysterious in the following
particular. We can avoid the problem on our P4 machine IF
we go to the browser first, view the destination page for
a given link, move on to some other page, and then click
the link in the spreadsheet - which takes us back to the
page we want. If we close and re-open Excel, the link
again fails to work. On the P4 machine, Excel can only
find a page that is in the cache of an open browser, or
that it has already visited in the current session. But,
on the P3 machine, Excel has whatever it takes to open the
browser and find the correct web page.
Seems like we need to know something about browser and
Excel settings. This fault is mission critical for us.