Resolve Azure DevOps Office integration issues
TFS 2018
All Office integration tasks require an installed version of Visual Studio or the free Azure DevOps Office Integration 2019. The software installs the Azure DevOps Office Integration Add-in or Team Foundation Office Integration Add-in. For a list of prerequisites, see Azure Boards and Office integration.
If you don't see the Team ribbon in Microsoft Excel, as shown in the following image, you might want to resolve the issue with the procedures provided in this article.
Important
Microsoft Project Integration and the TFSFieldMapping command are not supported for:
- Visual Studio 2019 and Azure DevOps Office® Integration 2019
- Azure DevOps Server 2019 and later versions, including Azure DevOps Services.
However, full support for Microsoft Excel integration is maintained and supports bulk import and update of work items. Alternatives to using Microsoft Project include the following:
- Delivery plans
- A Marketplace extension such as Project Connect or GANTT chart.
From the Excel File menu, choose Options.
Choose Add-ins and from the Manage picklist, choose COM Add-ins, and then choose Go.
Make sure that a check is placed in the Team Foundation Add-in checkbox.
Restart Excel. You should now see the Team ribbon.
If the Team ribbon doesn't appear at next launch, the load behavior of the add-in might be changed, so complete the following steps:
Launch the Registry Editor from your Windows Start Menu by entering
regedit
in the Search or Run box.Go to one of the following paths containing the TFCOfficeShim.Connect.[version] folder:
Note
If there are multiple folders with the same name, select the one with the highest version number.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins
(if this key doesn't exist, try one of the following options)HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins
Double-click to open LoadBehavior and set the value data field to 3 (if the value is 0, the Team ribbon doesn't load).
Select OK and restart Excel.
To learn more about the LoadBehavior entry, see Registry Entries for VSTO Add-ins, LoadBehavior values.
To connect to Azure Boards, go to the Team ribbon and choose New List. If the New List dialog fails to open, or you receive TF86001 or similar error message, then you might need to repair Visual Studio.
This error is typically caused when you install Visual Studio before you install Office Excel or Project. In this instance, the Visual Studio Tools for Office Run Time aren't correctly configured. To correct this error, you must repair Visual Studio.
Note
For authentication issues, such as TF31003
and TF30063
, please refer to User account does not have permission.
Install Visual Studio to ensure that you have access to the Visual Studio Command Prompt and the Gacutil.exe (Global Assembly Cache Tool). If you don't have Visual Studio, you can install the Visual Studio Community edition for free.
Open the Visual Studio Command Prompt and choose to run it as an administrator.
For Microsoft 365, run the following commands:
GACUTIL /I C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Policy.14.0.Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel\15.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Policy.14.0.Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll
GACUTIL /I C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Policy.14.0.office\15.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Policy.14.0.Office.dll
For Office 2016 and Office 2013, run the following commands:
GACUTIL /I C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Policy.12.0.Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel\15.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Policy.12.0.Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll
GACUTIL /I C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Policy.12.0.office\15.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Policy.12.0.Office.dll
For Office 2010, run the following commands:
GACUTIL /I C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Policy.12.0.Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel\14.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Policy.12.0.Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll
GACUTIL /I C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Policy.12.0.office\14.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Policy.12.0.Office.dll
Once you've successfully run the
GACUTIL
commands, restart Excel and look for the Azure DevOps Integration Tool for Office add-in.
If the above steps are unsuccessful, try the following steps:
Run a full repair of Office.
Uninstall Office and Reinstall Office.
Contact the Microsoft support team.
If a user changed their network password and begins receiving authentication errors with the new account info, they might be experiencing a known issue. The token stored within Visual Studio is no longer valid, but the system doesn't recognize that it needs to be refreshed. The user doesn't have to take any action, the token expires after some time and authentication begins working again, but there's no way to estimate the delay. Use the following workaround to manually remove the token.
Close all open instances of Excel.
Save and then clear the registry path, these commands can be run from Command Prompt opened with the "run as administrator" option:
reg export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\14.0\ClientServices\TokenStorage\VisualStudio\VssApp %TEMP%\oicreds.reg
reg delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VSCommon\14.0\ClientServices\TokenStorage\VisualStudio\VssApp
Open Excel and it prompts for sign-in when it connects to Azure DevOps.
Wait until the token expires or delete this reg key every time a password changes, if it's configured in a way that causes this issue.
If a user has errors when doing a refresh or publish, it might be due to a Conditional Access Policy in Microsoft Entra ID. To resolve this issue, try clearing the contents of the folder %LOCALAPPDATA%\.IdentityService
.
You might receive an error message when you try to open a TFS work item list in Excel, triggered from Team Explorer. For more information, see How to solve “Unable to cast COM object of type Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.ApplicationClass' to interface type 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel._Application'.”