Client drivers only for Excel
I am trying to help people connect to SQL 2005 Express from Excel, such as Excel 2000 or 2003. I don't want to install a big toolset on their machine, just enough so that when they try (in Excel) to connect to external data, the SQL Native Client will show up in the driver list.
Our installed version of SQL Server 2005 Express is connecting to external clients just fine.
I searched, but could not find this in this forum.
Dennis Nomer
In fact, I have gotten the Excel - SQL 2005 Express connection to work for my ancient Excel 2000. However, I was unable to get Excel 2003 or Excel 2007 to connect to our SQL 2005 Express server. Here is more detail:
An administrative person has to pull down rows from a table in our new SQL 2005 Express (SP2) database and simply dump them into an excel spreadsheet. Everything was working fine when we were using SQL 2000 Standard. But with the new database (SQL 2005 Express), I cannot get it to connect. To get it to connect from my old Excel 2000, I did the normal thing: Data>Get External Data>New Database Query, pick <New Data Source>, give it a name, and for the driver -- the old SQL Server would not work but the newly-installed Native Client worked like a charm. I give it the IP of the server, uncheck Trusted Connection, give the login, select a database under Options, and life is good.
On this other machine, however, running Excel 2003, I could not get anything to work, even though she could connect before (and still can) to our SQL 2000 Standard database (using the normal SQL Server driver). I went so far as to install the entire 200+ MB Express Toolkit on her machine, and she can connect to our SQL 2005 Express database via the Management Studio Express (which I prefer she not use, as you can guess), but I cannot get Excel 2003 to connect, using the newly-installed Native Client driver, to SQL 2005 Express. When it fails to connect, it says this:
Connection failed:
SQLState: '08001'
SQL Server Error: -1
[Microsoft][Sql Native Client]SQL Network Interfaces: Error getting enabled protocols list from registry [xFFFFFFFF].
Connection failed:
(etc.)
Before installing the Great Big Toolkit (which is SP2), I tried installing just the Native Client driver from 2005. It didn't work, either.
Let me know what you think. I can get on her machine and do whatever. Thanks for your time and attention.
dn
