For some reason I attract all kinds of misery when working with Master Data Services. Today I was trying to install the add-in for SQL Server 2012 on a machine that has Office 2016 64-bit installed. I clicked on the link in the MDS webpage which send me to the download page of the MDS 2012 SP1 add-in. However, I was greeted with the following error message when running the installer:
These prerequisites are not installed: 64-bit version of Microsoft Excel 2010
I had all the prerequisites installed (.NET framework 4.6.2 and the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime) and the correct bitness. A quick search led me to this KB article:
The article says you can get rid of the error message by using the 2012SP1 installer. Which I was using. Dead end. I also found this post at Katie&Emil: MDS Excel 2013 and 2010 Add-in Installation. Emil had the same issue and succeeded in installing the add-in by running the installer as admin through the command line. However, I still got the same error. That add-in must really hate Office 2016.
So I installed the SQL Server 2016 add-in which did install successfully, but apparently isn’t able to connect to SQL Server 2012. No backwards compatibility. I turned to Twitter and someone suggested me to install the 2014 add-in. Luckily, this one does install and fortunately has backwards compatibility with SQL Server 2012.
To wrap everything up:
- SQL Server 2012 with Office 2010 – MDS add-in for SQL Server 2012
- SQL Server 2012 with Office 2013 – MDS add-in for SQL Server 2012 SP1
- SQL Server 2012 with Office 2016 – MDS add-in for SQL Server 2014
- SQL Server 2014 – MDS add-in for SQL Server 2014
- SQL Server 2016 – MDS add-in for SQL Server 2016 (no backwards compatibility)
- SQL Server 2017 – MDS add-in for SQL Server 2017
