Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker add-in is conflicting with Excel – There have been multiple reports of users that have been able to resolve the issue by disabling or uninstalling the PDFMaker plugin.Corrupted Office installation – Some affected users have reported that the issue was resolved after they reinstalled or repaired the entire Office installation.DDE Protocol is disabled from Excel – This issue might be occurring because the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol is disabled from Excel’s settings.If the response does not arrive in the default time threshold, Excel will trigger the following warning to the end user: ‘Microsoft Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action’Īlthough the error message is always the same, there is actually a couple of fairly common scenario that will trigger this particular error in Microsoft Excel: If Excel issues a communication request to another application (let’s say Word), it does it using the OLE object and then waits for the response from the application.

We even managed to replicate the issue on one of our testing machines. We investigated this particular issue by looking at various user reports and looking at the official Microsoft documentation. What is causing the ‘Microsoft Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action’ error? The issue is reported to occur on all the recent Windows versions including Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10) Microsoft Excel is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action What is an OLE action?Īn Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) action is essentially a mechanism designed to help various Office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Sharepoint) to communicate with other applications in order to complete an operation successfully. Several Office users report getting the “Microsoft is waiting for another application to complete an OLE action” error when trying to run a VBA script or when trying to run Excel from a BI launch pad.

Another word for running reports