OLE objects don't work anymore

[Tarlochan S. Nahal]

Dear Yves Barbion,
 
Welcome to the club!
 
The OLE objects stopped working for me and other writers in our group over five months ago (FM 7.2, on XP). Frame simply refused to take them anymore due to no fault of ours. 
 
Anytime I tried to do bring an OLE, a FrameMaker message showed up:
 
"An internal error occurred while writing imported graphics in this document. The file has been saved, but has lost some image."
 
In reality the file was not saved at all and was NOT allowed to be saved it unless I got rid of the OLE object! Even double clicking on an existing OLE drawing in Frame would triigger Frame's allergies!  
 
This issue has been raised at least twice since then in this forum. The culprit seems to be a fix in SP3 Windows upgrade. By so doing, I am told, Microsoft fixed some sort of remote server bug! I hope they find a better way of fixing bugs! 
 
I talked to Adobe Tech Support few weeks ago and they told me that OLE is supported in FM 9, but not for 7.2 or so. How long will it continue to be supported? I do not know. 
 
Based on the advice from some Framers and my own experience, it is not a good idea to move OLE objects into Frame in the first place. The best way is to import them is by reference. This method works almost flawlessly. You can perhaps save the Excel file into pdf and then import it by reference. Of course, like any other imported graphic file, you have to repeat the process if the original file gets updated in Excel.
 
Regards,
 
Tarlochan S. Nahal
 
Sr. Technical Writer
Atheros Communications, Inc.

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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 14:04:16 +0100
From: Yves Barbion <yves.barbion at gmail.com>
Subject: OLE objects don't work anymore
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Message-ID:
	<2d78e7070902050504m5b1cd5v68ce26e5b814dc8f at mail.gmail.com>
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Hi Frameusers

I'm using FrameMaker 7.2 p158, Windows XP SP3 and Excel 2003 and 2007. I
copy a couple of cells from an Excel sheet and past them as OLE objects in
some of my FM documents. I do it this way for this type of documents because
the tables contain formulas. I only have one or two of these objects in my
FM docs, so file size isn't the issue here. This has always worked pretty
well until some time ago. I now see the following behavior: when I paste the
copied cells in my FM document as OLE object (Edit > Paste Special >
Paste
Link), I just get to see a very small empty anchored frame of 4 x 4 mm.

When I paste the copied cells in FM8 and FM9, everything is okay.

Has anyone had this experience with FM 7.2 too? Any ideas why these OLE
objects stopped working at some point?

Thanks in advance



-- 
Yves