Why can't I create an Excel VSTO workbook project in Visual Studio 2010?

Question

I try to create an Excel 2010 workbook project in Visual studio. I go into Visual Studio and Choose new project and choose Excel 2010 Workbook and then i just get a pop up that says "The project cannot be created" with no other info

any suggestions why VS 2010 is not letting me create an Excel workbook project? (It does create an Excel addin project fine). This error message above is not very helpful. Given that the error message is not very helpful is there anyway to debug to get more information that would make this question easier to answer

Answer 1

I got a similar error - in order to fix it, while in Excel I went to Options -> Add-ins -> Manage Excel Add-ins -> Automation -> and Selected "Visual Studio Tools for Office Design-Time Adaptor for Excel". Then restart Excel and (if you had the same issue) you should be good to go.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue with Visual Studio 2015 and Office 2016.

It turned out to be a bug introduced in latest updates of Office.

To revert back to an older revision, open an Administrator Command Prompt and type:

cd %programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun
officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.6965.2063

See:

• Error: The project cannot be created. (Excel 2016 VSTO Workbook)
• How to revert to an earlier version of Office 2013 or Office 2016 Click-to-Run
• Version and build numbers of update channel releases for Office 365 clients