Bhanu Prakash Bysani's Blog

“Excel Services is unable to process the request. Wait a few minutes and try performing this operation again.”

Posted on April 5, 2011 | 8 Comments

On your Sharepoint 2010 site users are uploading Excel files. Excel 2003 files (xls) will work ok and will open in Excel when you click them. On the other hand – when you have xlsx file it will try to open in xls viewer inside your browser. In some circumstances (I will describe it in this post) it will fail. User will get an error:

“Excel Services is unable to process the request. Wait a few minutes and try performing this operation again.”

Investigation steps:

1. Check if your excel services is running
2. Check if your server have this hotfix installed : KB976462  – I had this installed but error was still therehttp://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/976462?p=1
3. Myth busted – you dont need Office Web Apps installed to make it work – don’t bother installing it.
4. Check if your web application has Excel service connection – this part was missing in my case. Go to Central Admin > Manage Webapplications. Click application that hosts your site collection. Click “Service Connections”. Check if your Excel Service Application is ticked. If not change connections from default to custom and tick this Service.

If, for some reason, you don’t want files to be open in browser but you want them to be always open in client application, you can do it in two ways:

1. All sites at once – this is tricky but you need to go to Central Administration > Site Settings > Site collection features and turn on this feature – “Open Documents in Client Application By Default”. Yes, feature for Central Admin site will influence every site in your farm (interesting…)