How to close modal windows automatically?

[blokeyhighlander]

I dashboard a continuously running PowerPoint presentation that feeds off of data and charts from Excel. From time to time (between once to a handful of times a day) I get the error message in PowerPoint: "The Source Application is Busy and Can't Respond Immediately."

Via Microsoft, You Cannot Stop or Cancel the "The Source Application Is Busy and Can't Respond Immediately" Error Message, it's because a modal window is open in Excel. However, every time I receive this error, I go to Excel and I don't see a modal window, so the error appears to have taken care of itself in Excel immediately. However, PowerPoint won't continue until I hit retry (which always works).

Is there any way I can automatically close out of a modal window? At this point, I can only hypothesize what might be causing the error because the error window never shows in Excel by the time I get there. I'm thinking it's either:

• Using the ontime() function, I automatically refresh the pivot caches and charts every ten minutes. This may conflict with a PowerPoint add-on that refreshes the links to the Excel objects every time the slideshow loops. The presentation hangs for a few seconds every time the linked data changes, and I'm wondering if PowerPoint is unable to read the link data if it is being refreshed in Excel. I always receive this error on the first slide (when it refreshes the linked data) so I'm thinking the likely culprit is in here.
• I have data connections in Excel that use web queries to google drive, sometimes I get an error message in Excel that says the data refresh was unsuccessful, but this doesn't appear to have any affect on the PowerPoint presentation.

Do you guys think the problem is fixable in Excel or is it a PowerPoint issue? Is there any way to at least automatically close out the unsuccessful web query error box?

 

[blokeyhighlander]

Hmm.. it doesn't appear to be the web query error box. I did Application.DisplayAlerts = False, and I'm still having this issue.

The "The Source Application is Busy and Can't Respond Immediately" error is popping up as Excel is in the process of refreshing the data queries/pivot caches AND PowerPoint is accessing the linked file from Excel. Any ideas on how to fix this? The macro I'm using to update the data queries and pivot caches is below. And I'm using the 'update links during slideshow' add-in from Update Links during Slide Show Add-in

Sub Refresh()
Application.DisplayAlerts = False
For Each wSht In ThisWorkbook.Worksheets
For Each qt In wSht.QueryTables
qt.Refresh
Next
For Each pt In ActiveWorkbook.PivotCaches
​pt.Refresh
Next
Next
Application.DisplayAlerts = True
Application.OnTime Now + TimeValue("00:15:00"), "Refresh"
End Sub

 

[Colin Legg]

Just came across this post today, was having similar issues with querytables from a C# application (exception "HRESULT: 0x8001010A RPC_E_SERVERCALL_RETRYLATER: The message filter indicated that the application is busy").

Try ensuring that the QueryTable.Refresh() BackgroundQuery parameter is set to False, ie:

[COLOR=#333333][FONT=arial][I]qt.Refresh False[/I][/FONT][/COLOR]