Sorry you're having problems with this. We have investigated the issue and a fix for it will be included in the upcoming v27.1 release (current ETA for this is mid December).

In the meantime there is a workaround but it is not pretty and involves editing the Widows Registry - usual warnings about taking care when editing the registry applies if you wanted to do this. If you close Excel, then in the Registry go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Sage\Line 50\History\RecentlyUsedCompanies and delete the entry for the company you want to refresh. Then reopen Excel and your spreadsheet with the data you want to refresh, add the company back in via the Sage 50 Accounts tab. The refresh button should now work and any data ranges in the spreadsheet will be refreshed. Unfortunately you will then either have to keep Excel open afterwards or you'll need to perform these steps again.

Alternatively the legacy version of Excel Integrated Reporting is available for download if you log on to your My Sage account and go to the downloads section look for 'v26 - Excel Integrated Reporting (EIR) module' under the updates section. Despite the name this should work with the v27 release but means you will have multiple tabs in Excel and there are no plans to further update or maintain this version so if you are able to wait for the fix with v27.1 that would be the better long term solution.

I've tried editing the registry, but now wont let me add the company back.

If I try to Add company, I get a 'Connection Error' error box with a long message starting 'Unable to connect to the Sage Data Service on machine 127.0.0.1 ...' and then gives several reasons why that might be. Without knowing what machine is meant by 127.0.0.1, it's hard to track further.

Many thanks,

Ian

127.0.0.1 is the local machine (known as localhost). That error means that Excel is trying to connect to the Accounts dataservice on the that machine but if cannot. The error message should provide some troubleshooting notes but I'd suspect that the most likely cause of this is that the service is not running. One thing to note is that it Excel will try to connect to the dataservice for each version of the data it finds i.e. if you have v26 data it will try to connect to the v26 data service, if it also finds v27 data it will try to connect to the v27 data service, etc. The error message could relate to any version so make sure the data service is running for all versions.

Sage is running on a standalone PC with no networking and no other users accessing the data - software and data are all on the PC hard drive. I can't quite fathom how I was able to run a new excel report in v27 (see original post) if there was no data service running. I also do not know how to start, restart or otherwise change the data service - this has always been automatic on all previous versions up to v26

The network stack is technically still involved even though you are running the the application and dataservice locally. In terms of troubleshooting the only thing that running locally likely takes out of the equation is the firewall blocking access.

The data service does run automatically under normal circumstances, and this has not changed for v27, but one of the possible causes of the error message you are getting is if the service were stopped for some reason (deliberately or accidentally). This is why I was suggesting checking that the data service(s) are running just in case.

To check if you go to your start menu and type services.msc you should see the Services app. Launch that and look for and  services called 'Sage 50 Accounts Service vXX' (where XX is the major version number of the Accounts application(s) you have installed). In the status column it should say 'Running' if the services is active. Check this for all versions of Accounts Vs the versions of the data files you have on your PC. It is possible,for example, that you have v26 data files but do not have a v26 dataservice running because the v27 application was installed as an upgrade rather than side by side.

If you are still having difficulties then your best bet would either be to wait for the v27.1 release that addresses your original refresh issue or to install the legacy version of Excel Integrated Reporting that I mentioned above as this does not suffer from the refresh issue.

Hope that helps.