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Microsoft OfficeOffice 2016System Administrator

FIX for “There was a problem sending the command to the program”

I encountered this error the other day and hadn’t seen it before:

When starting any office program by opening a file, the user saw: “There was a problem sending the command to the program.” Then when dragging the file to Excel, the file opened fine. What the heck?!

Turns out you have to turn off something called DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) in the settings. This Microsoft KB article details the problem.

Go to the Office app in question and go to the Options. From there, click on Advanced and make sure “”Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)” is UNCHECKED like below in my version of Excel 2016.

dde

Microsoft OfficeOffice 2016

Outlook 2016 Attachment Tweaks

I’ve been using the beta build of Office 2016 and one of the nice new features that I’ve been getting use out of is the “Attach File” button. Before, you were prompted for a folder and file when clicking this button. In Outlook 2016, you are shown recent documents that you have saved. So if you work on Doc21.docx, save it, then go into Outlook and click ‘Attach File’… that file is the first one listed without needing to navigate around folders and finding your file! Nifty little feature. Screenshot below:

 

Outlook2016Attach