Excel OLE Error After Move to Google Drive

Question

Hey all, 

We have started to receive OLE errors from a few members in our office. It originally started with only one person, but now it has moved to several. When having their documents open for longer periods of time, they will freeze. The document will stay frozen from a few seconds, to a few minutes (sometimes up to half an hour or more). A popup occurs, stating the OLE error. "Microsoft Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action."

I have attempted to fix this issue using the following: 

• Uninstalling Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker
• Checking the "ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) box.
• Disabling compatibility mode (although most documents did not have this enabled).

I found that the "dynamic data exchange (DDE)" box seemed to resolve the issue temporarily for one of our users, but would disallow others to open a document. (Excel document would remain grey, and would not show cells). Some employees do not work on the same documents, so it is not relating to just one excel file. 

I noticed this issue has only started to occur once we moved our company files to Google Cloud. We are using Google Drive File Stream primarily for our cloud access, as well as the web portal. Has there been any other reported issues with Google cloud and excel? 

Thank you,

Seth

Answer 1

Hi, I'm Elise, an independent advisor and I'd be happy to help with your issue.

Other users have reported that the real time presence feature of google drive is causing this, please follow these steps to disable:

Real-time presence is automatically turned on. To turn it off:

On your computer, click the Drive File Stream Menu Drive File Stream.

Click More and thenPreferences.

Under Real time presence in Microsoft Office, uncheck the box.

Click Done.

Kind Regards,

Elise

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/93087...

Note: This is a non-Microsoft website. The page appears to be providing accurate, safe information. Watch out for ads on the site that may advertise products frequently classified as a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Products). Thoroughly research any product advertised on the site before you decide to download and install it.

Answer 2

I'm still having this issue - even with a new Dell PC and fresh install of MS Office.

One thing I've noticed though is that I have experienced this issue with files saved to the desktop, and not tracked by Drive File Stream. Has anyone else had that experience? That would make me think it is NOT a DFS issue, and related only to Microsoft.

Answer 3

I want to emphasize Seth's question here, because we are running into the same issue: the real time presence feature is really handy and deactivating it is not a long term solution.

Is there a fix in the works for this issue?

Thanks a lot,

Ben

Answer 4

This has been an issue I've been struggling with for a 1-2 years, and very frustrating. I have searched many times and glad to see a recent and open forum on it.

I had previously found similar advise, disabling the "real time presence" feature in DFS. That has not solved my issue, as it still happens daily with Excel, Office and (I think) Powerpoint. It freezes most applications and prevents me from doing anything for several minutes.

Sometimes (but not always) I get the "Wating for OLE object to complete" message from an MS product. Other times I get a message from DFS "having trouble syncing. Try removing cache from anti-virus" (or something like that). Most of the time, no message. But every time, it's when opening a MS product file and I always verify that DFS is trying to sync that file when the freeze happens.

Any other advise? I have scoured the internet several times, and have reached out to Google Workplace (formerly G Suite) chat support.. All they did was suggest shift+right-click > Refresh in the Windows Explorer folder prior to opening the document. That's hard to work into muscle memory but I am skeptical it's going to resolve anything.

Answer 5

It appears that that did solve our issues. Some of our users liked that real-time presence feature. Is this something that is known to cause problems and is actively being worked on?