ASAP Utilities for Excel - How to solve the startup error: "Sorry, something went wrong in the ASAP Utilities.xla auto_open() event, build menu."

How to solve the startup error: "Sorry, something went wrong in the ASAP Utilities.xla auto_open() event, build menu."

Issue

A few of our users with the 32-bit edition of Excel recently started experiencing the following error when starting Excel with ASAP Utilities:

Sorry, something went wrong in the ASAP Utilities.xla auto_open() event, build menu.
-2147417848: Method 'ASAP_Utilities_MenuBuilder' of object '_CPublic' failed on line 670

Solution

Starting from November 8, we were contacted by about ten users that suddenly ran into an issue with their ASAP Utilities in combination with Excel 2016 32-bit. That seemed to be caused by a recent Microsoft update.
Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce this on any of our test or production systems so far, but in corporation with these users we've found a workaround for it.

In case you get this error then:

  1. Update MS Excel, the Excel team may have fixed it already.
  2. Run the ASAP Utilities setup again and choose to install the "32-bit + 64-bit edition" of version 7.4.
    or
    Install the preview edition of ASAP Utilities 7.5

The importance of Microsoft Office Update | Fix random Excel crashes

We recommend to keep your Office up to date, because the Microsoft team is continuously working on it.
Unfortunately, several bugs were introduced in Excel 2016/265 and Excel's VBA/macro language that could cause slow performance and crashes in Excel.

Fortunately Microsoft has already released many updates with fixes related to the performance and stability of Excel 2016/365.