Friday, November 23, 2012

Getting Rid of the CRM Export to Excel Message

When you export to Excel from CRM and open the exported spreadsheet in Excel, you will receive the warning:

This warning is due to a security feature in Excel 2007 and greater that checks the contents of a file to make sure that they match the file extension.
Given that the CRM data is exported using XML and saved with an .xls format, Excel doesn’t think that the format of the file is correct.


While this is probably designed to prevent some legitimate security concerns,
it winds up having the opposite effect for people who export frequently from
Excel—since this message will be popping up for them so frequently that they
will be conditioned to always click “Yes.” As a result, more legitimate security
warnings are easily ignored.


There are two options for getting rid of this warning:
1. Group Policy – “Getting IT Right” blog has a good post
on how to globally suppress this warning using group policy.
http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2010/07/01/annoying-file-format-warning-whenexporting-crm-records-to-excel/
2. Per Computer – You can easily get rid of this warning using a simple
registry change on your computer. The following instructions are for Excel
2010. If you have 2007, the only change is that the location of the registry
folder will be …\Microsoft\OFFICE\12.0\EXCEL\SECURITY.
 1. Open your Registry (Start -> Run -> regedit.exe)
 2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\OFFICE\14.0\EXCEL\SECURITY
 3. Right click in the right window and choose New -> DWORD
 4. Type “ExtensionHardening” as the name (without the quotes)
 5. Verify that the data has the value “0I


Normal warnings apply—don’t modify your registry unless you know what
you are doing!

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