Microsoft CRM and Excel 2007

I've recently been assembling a demo for the Microsoft CRM / IW team in Sweden for the launch of Vista and Office 2007. The new V3C client is great but the one I could use was a beta and was a bit buggy.

One of the features of Microsoft CRM that many managers (and others) like is the Excel-button on lists. However, with Excel 2007, it doesn't work out of the box. For the demo, I got it to work by doing the following actions. Please note that these actions should only be used in a demo environment since they severely alter some of the security settings of Excel. When I find a better way to handle this (or if I find some one else that does), I will let you know.

1. Make sure you are running Excel as a user that has access to the CRM database. This is due to the fact that Excel will try to access the database directly and it wont work properly if you don't have access. The best way is to use a client computer that is part of the domain and a user that is a CRM user. That usually solves it.
2. Add "c:\users" to the trusted places in the trust center.
3. Set "Trust all incomming connections (not recommended)" in the trust center.

Now it should work. Sometimes it takes Excel a while to get the data from the server, so be a bit patient. When I wrote this, I didn't have access to a test environment with CRM and Excel 2007 so I might have some details wrong (like the exact naming of fields in trust center).

I hope it works for you, Microsoft CRM 3 with the new Excel 2007 with conditional formating will blow the socks off any Manager I know... :)

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se