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Resolve Azure DevOps Office integration issues

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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.

Screenshot of Excel TFS-Office integration Team ribbon.

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:

Enable the Azure DevOps add-in

  1. From the Excel File menu, choose Options.

  2. Choose Add-ins and from the Manage picklist, choose COM Add-ins, and then choose Go.

    Screenshot of Excel Options, Add-ins, Choose Com Add-ins.

  3. Make sure that a check is placed in the Team Foundation Add-in checkbox.

    Screenshot of COM Add-ins dialog, Team Foundation Add-in checked.

  4. 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:

Update the registry

  1. Launch the Registry Editor from your Windows Start Menu by entering regedit in the Search or Run box.

    Screenshot of Run regedit command.

  2. 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

Screenshot of LoadBehavior entry.

  1. Double-click to open LoadBehavior and set the value data field to 3 (if the value is 0, the Team ribbon doesn't load).

  2. Select OK and restart Excel.

    To learn more about the LoadBehavior entry, see Registry Entries for VSTO Add-ins, LoadBehavior values.

Office add-in doesn't load or open in Excel when Visual Studio fails

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.

TF86001 error message, Team Foundation was unable to load the Office Add-in.

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.

Prerequisites

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.

Run the Gacutil tool

  1. Open the Visual Studio Command Prompt and choose to run it as an administrator.

    Screenshot of Developer Command Prompt for VS2015 start menu with 'Run as administrator

  2. 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

  3. 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:

  1. Run a full repair of Office.

  2. Uninstall Office and Reinstall Office.

  3. Contact the Microsoft support team.

User can't sign in to Azure DevOps from Excel after password change

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.

Remove the token from the registry

  1. Close all open instances of Excel.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

Intermittent issues doing refresh and publish

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.

Unable to cast COM object of type Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.ApplicationClass...

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'.”