Excel error HRESULT: 0x800A03EC while trying to get range with cell's name

Question

I am working with Window Service project. that have to write data to a sheet in Excel file in a sequence times.

But sometimes, just sometimes, the service throw out

Answer 1

I got this when I forgot to unprotect workbook or sheet.

Answer 2

I found a possible solution here: http://www.made4dotnet.com/Default.aspx?tabid=141&aid=15

Edit:

If you automate Microsoft Excel with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft Visual C# .NET, or Microsoft Visual C++, you may receive the following errors when calling certain methods because the machine has the locale set to something other than US English (locale ID or LCID 1033):

Exception from HRESULT: 0x800A03EC

and/or

Old format or invalid type library

SOLUTION 1:

---

To get around this error you can set CurrentCulture to en-US when executing code related to Excel and reset back to your originale by using these 2 functions.

//declare a variable to hold the CurrentCulture
System.Globalization.CultureInfo oldCI;
//get the old CurrenCulture and set the new, en-US
void SetNewCurrentCulture()
{
  oldCI = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
  System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US");
}
//reset Current Culture back to the originale
void ResetCurrentCulture()
{
  System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = oldCI;
}

SOLUTION 2:

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Another solution that could work, create a 1033 directory under Microsoft Office\Office11 (or your corresponding office-version), copy excel.exe to the 1033 directory, and rename it to xllex.dll.

Although you might solve the problem using one off these solutions, when you call the Excel object model in locales other than US English, the Excel object model can act differently and your code can fail in ways you may not have thought of. For example, you might have code that sets the value of a range to a date:

yourRange.Value2 = "10/10/09"

Depending on the locale this code can act differently resulting in Excel putting into the range any of the following values:

October 10, 2009 September 10, 2009 October 9, 2010

Answer 3

Using Dominic's answer I found the answer to my problem specifically was an invalid DateTiime in the source data before it was applied to the range. Somewhere between the database, .NET and Excel the conversion of the date defaulted down to "1/1/1899 12:00:00 AM". I had to check it and convert it to an empty string and it fixed it for me.

if (objectArray[row, col].ToString() == "1/1/1899 12:00:00 AM")
{
    objectArray[row, col] = string.Empty;
}

This is probably a pretty specific example but hopefully it will save somebody else some time if they are trying to track down a piece of invalid data.

Answer 4

I ran into this error because I was attempting to write a string to a cell which started with an "=".

The solution was to put an "'" (apostrophe) before the equals sign, which is a way to tell excel that you're not, in fact, trying to write a formula, and just want to print the equals sign.

Answer 5

I had this problem when I was trying to use the range.AddComment() function. I was able to solve this by calling range.ClearComment() before adding the comment.

Answer 6

If you can copy the whole exception it would be much more better, but once I faced with this Exception and this is because the function calling from your dll file which I guess is Aspose.dll hasn't been signed well. I think it would be the possible duplicate of this

FYI, in order to find out if your dll hasn't been signed well you should right-click on that and go to the signiture and it will tell you if it has been electronically signed well or not.