Troubleshooting
Problem
User launches Controller. User clicks 'Company - Data Entry - Reported Values'. This automatically opens Excel in the background. If the user manually closes Excel (but does not close the 'Data Entry - Reported Values' window) then Excel disappears from visibility *but* a session of EXCEL.EXE remains inside Task Manager. Unless this EXCEL.EXE process is manually ended, other symptoms/problems will occur later.
Symptom
Example:
Below are a series of steps that will generate the problem:
1. Launch Controller
2. Logon (for example as ADM)
3. Click "Company – Data Entry – Reported Values"
- The screen 'Data Entry - Reported Values' will appear
- Wait a few (10) seconds for Excel to fully open in the background
- You will notice that only one EXCEL.EXE is running inside Task Manager:
4. Now close Excel (by clicking the ‘X’ at the top-right corner of Excel)
- Unfortunately, EXCEL.EXE does not close/disappear-from-task-manager.
- In other words, if you look at the ‘taskbar’ there is no instance of Excel visible, but there IS a session of EXCEL.EXE inside Task Manager:
5. Now click “Controller Link” (the green 'X' button inside the Controller client)
- What happens is that a new Excel session appears on the screen (as expected) BUT two copies of EXCEL.EXE appear in Task Manager (unexpected):
6. Now if you click “Controller Link” again, you now see THREE sessions of EXCEL.EXE appear:
- You also get this error:
User ADM already logged in to this database.
[{"Product":{"code":"SS9S6B","label":"IBM Cognos Controller"},"Business Unit":{"code":"BU048","label":"IBM Software"},"Component":"Controller","Platform":[{"code":"PF033","label":"Windows"}],"Version":"10.2.1","Edition":"","Line of Business":{"code":"LOB76","label":"Data Platform"}},{"Product":{"code":"SSMRTZ","label":"IBM Cognos Controller on Cloud"},"Business Unit":{"code":"BU048","label":"IBM Software"},"Component":" ","Platform":[{"code":"","label":""}],"Version":"","Edition":"","Line of Business":{"code":"LOB76","label":"Data Platform"}}]
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Document Information
Modified date:
08 May 2025
UID
swg21962405