How to make Microsoft Web Browser object work in Excel 2016

Question

When I try to insert it, I constantly get the "Cannot insert object" error. It seems to be a known issue with former Excel versions, but I couldn't find any support for 2016.

Has anyone been able to make this work?

Here are screenshots:

Answer 1

This appears to be intentional behaviour from Excel 2013 onwards. From this article:

This issue occurs because some scriptable controls are made obsolete in Office 2013 for security reasons. This is by design, and these errors are expected.

There is a workaround posted in that article which involves editing the registry to make these controls work again.

(The KnowledgeBase article was originally linked from this Microsoft community thread from 2014)

Answer 2

Fix ActiveX Controls (such as the Web Browser) in Excel (Office 2013-16)

Navigate to

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\COM Compatibility\{8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2}]

"Compatibility Flags"=dword:00000000

Navigate to in order to find the GUID of the control you are trying to fix (I was needing to fix the Web Browser control thus opened its GUID). reference

Open the desired GUID and set dword to 0 (vs. 1024 (400H))

Answer 3

Context of the solution: -Win 10 version 1803 / 64bit os -Excel O365 ClicktoRun version 1806 10228.20080 / 64bit

The registry is located at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\COM Compatibility\{8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2}

And set the "Compatibility Flags" DWord to 0

Note: To reenable the blocking feature set Dword value back to "400"

Killbit option

This article also helped: Cannot insert certain scriptable ActiveX controls into Office 2013 documents

And this one: Security Settings for COM objects in Office