I can't drag/drop a file from explorer to Excel (but I can from another prog, like Everything)

[Nomen]

I do this a lot on my win-98 systems but don't use excel a lot in this particular win-7 PC.

I have Office 2000 installed on this PC (I don't think the Excel version matters, but anyways...) and I've just tried to drag a log file over to an open Excel spreadsheet and the minute the mouse is over the sheet area the icon turns into a red circle with a line through it, indicating it doesn't like being there I guess.  If I drag the file to the Excel title bar area it doesn't turn into a red circle, it turns into a little plus (+) symbol but releasing the mouse there does nothing - excel doesn't open the file.

Now if I use a program like the file-finding program "Everything", if I drag the same file from the Everything window over to excel, the file opens into the spreadsheet as expected.

Does anyone have an explanation for this?  Or a solution?

[mina7601]

I'm not sure about this, I can drag and drop a file from Windows Explorer to Excel 2000 just fine.

[Nomen]

I currently have 5 spreadsheets open, but they are all based on the same "instance" of excel.  I've created them by going file, new, worksheet.  They show up on the taskbar as 5 individual, accessible worksheets.  And as I've said, I can't seem to drag anything to them, or a new worksheet, without the mouse turning into a red circle.

Now, if from the taskbar I right-click on the top / main excel icon, and select "Microsoft Excel", a new excel window opens, perhaps this is a new instance of excel, and I *can* drag files to this new instance and the contents get dumped into the sheet as expected.

On the taskbar, this seems to be just another sheet, tacked onto the end of the other sheets.  I think that because I've saved the contents of the other sheets to their own xls file, that even by selecting "file, new, worksheet" that it doesn't qualify as a new / un-named sheet and it won't allow dragging a file into it. 

But it's wierd - I *can* drag a file from Everything to an existing worksheet, and it gets dumped into a excel as a new worksheet.  But I can't do this from exporer unless it's a new instance of excel.

[D.Draker]

I has a similar case where I couldn't even move executable files across the system, not to mention drag-n-drop, Windows 7 is nothing more but a big bug itself. The issue was never solved, even after all those years.

I posted about it on MSFN somewhere in 2020. Something tells me it will be the same in this case, good if I will be wrong. And I'm talking about a totally fresh install.

[D.Draker]

I've now remembered, a member wrote it's somehow related to the buggy bloated SP1, do you have it?

[Nomen]

Yes, this system was built from Windows 7 Ultimate, SP1, 32-bit (on a laptop with only 4 gb ram).  The install image was built from SP1 with a carefully selected set of updates/patches rolled in (I think I used Nlite?) back in the fall of 2016, with auto-updating turned of, windows defender turned off.  No MS updates installed since then.  There was not a lot of trust with MS back then, with their underhanded ways to force migration to win-10 and also the telemetry stuff.

On this same system I recently dealt with an issue where in explorer I couldn't right-click on a set of files to bring up the context menu if the selection included a zip file.  I posted about that here, and found a solution that included a couple new reg entries.