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Excel to Word Paste Special Object formating problem RDP, in the Terminal Services forum on BrianMadden.com

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Brian Tirado Posted: 10-31-2008 5:38 PM

Hi Guys,

Thanks again for the help in advance!

This is the enviornment, VMware virtual desktops VDI with Office 2003 professional current service packs and updates, I think the problem is more related to RDP than to the fact that VDI is in the mix because I tested it on a 2k3 TS and had the same result (I also tried it on one that had the patch for cleartype and font smoothing, same result)

This is the problem and it's a huge one!  When pasting into Word from Excel as an object the formating gets completely trashed.

How to:
1.  Open Excel document.
2.  Add some data.
3.  Copy.
4.  Open Word.
5.  Paste special from the edit menu.
6.  Select Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet Object
7.  Result is smashed weird looking pasted Object (If you double click the object to edit it again in excel the formating looks normal, as soon as you leave the editing mode it returns to the smashed text).

This is a super critical issue for me to get resolved and I've been banging my head trying to figure out what it is.

 

Image displaying the problem:  http://img507.imageshack.us/my.php?image=xlswordaf4.jpg

my.php?image=xlswordaf4.jpg

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Anyone have any ideas on this?  It looks normal in Citrix though that is not an option for this particular client.

 

Thanks,

Brian

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Top 25 Contributor
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Hi Brian,

This is a problem that existed in the early days of Citrix because of the shared session clipboard. If clipboard sharing is enabled (eg running rdpclip.exe in user session) then the clipboards are synchronised between the client machine and the host machine. The shared clipboard can give you really interesting results depending on the state of the synchronization when you paste something.

What Citrix did to "fix" the problem was to add longer timeout values to the clipboard synchronization mechanism. These appear under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Compatibility\Applications, and excel has a number of value defined, eg ClipboardFlags, OpenClipboardDelayinmillisecs, and OpenClipboardRetries.

I think that these values work for the shared clipboard for both RDP and ICA but to be honest I haven't checked out the RDP side of things. This is of course for terminal services but if you look for the same stuff on an XP workstation with RDP enabled the same values appear. So maybe they're ignored on XP. I'll have to check.

Anyway that's not the end of the world. Since VDM gives you a full desktop only, there is absolutely no need for a shared clipboard. Try turning it off. That should solve your problem

regards,

Rick

 

 

Ulrich Mack
Quest Software
Provision Networks Division
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Thanks for the responses guys!  I finally have this one figured out, this is what I did to resolve the issue:

Change this Key to:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Options]
"RDPUsePrinterMF"=dword:00000001

Download this patch:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958146/

From the downloaded patch only install the excel.msp using the following command:

msiexec /p "\\server\share\EXCEL.msp"

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