Excel services was unable to load the workbook that you requested

Recently came across quite a few of these errors for some reason from a handful of customers when they want to perform the site action “View in Web Browser” for an Excel Workbook. Typically you would receive the following error on screen;

“Excel services was unable to load the workbook that you requested”

In the ULS (Unified Logging Service) logs you would come across the following entry;

15/01/2008 10:42:58.30 w3wp.exe (0x0C48) 0x21F8 Excel Services Excel Calculation Services 3sie Information Unsupported UI culture he-IL was requested. Fell back to en-US. [Session: 22.91p5IoIUBE38IuFV1ozdvN90.5.en-US5.he-IL73.-0120#0000-00-00-00T00:00:00:0000#+0000#0000-00-00-00T00:00:00:0000#-0060 User: DOMAIN\system] 0000005b-8bd9-96b3-0000-000050f7b00b

15/01/2008 10:42:58.30 w3wp.exe (0x0C48) 0x21F8 Excel Services Excel Calculation Services 6nci Information The data culture he-IL was requested, and it is not fully supported because its language pack is not installed. Some features will not be available. [Session: 22.91p5IoIUBE38IuFV1ozdvN90.5.en-US5.he-IL73.-0120#0000-00-00-00T00:00:00:0000#+0000#0000-00-00-00T00:00:00:0000#-0060 User: DOMAIN\system] 0000005b-8bd9-96b3-0000-000050f7b00b

This particular customer had a simple medium sized Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 farm with a couple of Web Front-Ends and a couple Application servers, with one of the servers servicing the ECS (Exchange Calculation Services) role. We normally run through our run of the mill troubleshooting questions and make sure all the prerequisites are met. We can see from the error message in the ULS logs that the culture he-IL (Hebrew) is not supported and it’s falling back to en-US. Bingo. You need to remember, even though the language packs are installed on the Web Front-Ends for rendering your content you still NEED to install the same language packs on the server hosting your ECS role.

This customer had Service Pack 1 installed on the SharePoint farm so we needed to follow this procedure for the Application server holding the ECS role, best ermmm smart practice is to have the same language packs on all your servers in the farm;

* Install Supplemental Language Support for Windows Server 2003
* Download and install Office System Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2007
* Run “SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard”
* Download and install Office System Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2007 (SP1)
* Run “SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard”

Case closed.

Kristof Kowalski | kristof@kowalski.ms