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Question
Tuesday, December 11, 2018 7:42 PM | 1 vote
Hello TechNet,
I have a user who is having an issue when it comes to updating table data in Word that is stored in a Excel file. When she attempts to update the table the table disappears and is replaced with "Error! Not a valid link.". The original file is still in the same location and has not moved. The source Excel file along with the Word document are being stored on a network share. The link itself references the full UNC path to the file.
Now you can open the source file just fine form the Links window and even right click and edit the table from within the Word document which also opens the same Excel file. It is only the updating that seems to be broken.
One thing that I noticed which I thought seemed strange is when you look at the Links window in Word. The source information section seemed a bit strange to me which you can see in the pictured below.
Doing a test and copying the same field ranges from the same Excel file and pasting it into a fresh Word document results in different source information being displayed when viewing the Links Window as pictured below. This test document also does not see any issue with me clicking the update now button or update link option when right clicking on the table.
This leads me to conclude that possibility the links themselves are corrupted. If that is the case is there any way to some how fix these links without having to manually recreate every single one? Also I should note that on the source Excel file it has been protected with a password to prevent any write access to the file however you are fine to open the file in read only mode.
All replies (4)
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 9:27 AM
Do you try to open Excel first and then check if you can update data in Word?
Read the reply of shchronix, maybe it's helpful.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018 2:20 PM
Thank you for the reply. I tested trying to have the source file open first and then trying to update the data however the issue persisted. Also the registry keys referenced in that post are correctly set.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018 8:40 AM
Hi,
Did this problem resolve now? Would you like further assistance about this problem?
Regards,
Emi
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Monday, February 18, 2019 1:26 PM
I am having a similar issue. My coworker creates the document with the links. When I review, I open both source doc and Word doc. We work in a shared drive, so the name of the documents and location are not changing. I am unable to update any links and receive this error "Word is unable to create a link to the object you specified...."
However- if I just open the Word Doc and say YES to updating the links, it does update them. However, the size of the graphs is significantly smaller than what they were originally. Because of this- I usually do not update the links when I first open the document- to preserve the formatting. But if I need to update a specific linked object- that is when I get the errors