Background: I waited way too long to migrate from Win 7 Pro and Office Pro 2010 to a new Win 11 Pro laptop and Office Pro 2019. Really gasping to absorb the new realities. Microsoft and Windows 11 seemed intent on a very tightly coupled relationship that is not appealing. So Edge is not the default browser, Onedrive is not initialized, etc.
The installation of Office 2019 seemed to go fine. I picked up Greg Harvey’s Microsoft Excel 2019 for dummies at the local library. It’s been a good skim for picking up a lot of what’s new in Excel 2019. He enthusiastically recommends opening up the Welcome to Excel template and going through its examples. I hear that repeatedly searching across the web.
The problem is that Excel has no clue about that file or even the title. I’ve gone fishing with Windows Explorer drilling down in the AppData directory mainly focusing on the Roaming subdirectory following online advice dropping into Microsoft, Excel, Office, root, Templates, etc. directories. Finally did a search from C:\ for “*.xltx” with some results but nothing close.
And the Internet seems strangely quiet about it too. Official Microsoft forums surprisingly don’t have much. Even Google searches come up pretty sparse for relevant content. The best solid hit is excelunplugged.com but it is dated 2017 and probably is for Excel 2016. The site doesn’t seem to be very active now.
I vaguely recall that the installation of Office 2010 was much happier after a “starter” version of Office was uninstalled. Could the presence of MS Office 365 (un-activated) be a problem? Just checked the Recycle Bin – nothing suspicious there.
Did notice that Options -> Save -> Save Workbooks -> Default personal templates location is blank but any location I’d put in there still is missing the Welcome template. Also on the ribbon clicking Help -> Help, Contact Support or Show Training results in the message This command is not available. Your organization’s administrator has turned off the service required to use this feature.
AHA! Searching reveals:
“As Palcouk mentioned, in an Office app like Excel, click File > Options, locate to General > Privacy settings. Make sure “Enable optional connected experiences” is checked.”
Bingo! Welcome to Excel appears! There were three apparently associated options that seemed reasonable so they all got checked. Welcome downloads and runs.
Amazing how writing up a problem can focus the mind.
Hope this helps someone. Comments including off-subject on migration welcome.
