Why doesn’t the Openbox menu appear in Excel?

After installation, the Openbox menu should appear in the Excel ribbon, as shown above.

If it does not appear, there are a number of possible explanations including: failure to install properly, anti-virus tools blocking install or operation, Excel security settings and out of date Windows files.

First of all, please check that you are running 64-bit Excel (click here for how).

We recommend the following steps:

1. Reboot your computer
2. Uninstall Openbox using “Add/ remove programs” in the Start menu in Windows
3. Run Office repair (click to go to the Microsoft site)
4. Reboot your computer
5. Reinstall Openbox. Important – do NOT open Excel before or during this process
6. Re-open Excel

If this does not work, you can try temporarily disabling your anti-virus software at step 5, and re-enabling after step 6. We scan all Openbox downloads with all major anti-virus tools, before publishing, but there can be issues remaining.

You may also want to check your Excel security settings.  In Excel 365, click “File” then “Options”. Then click “Trust Center” and “Trust Center settings”. Click “Add-ins”, and uncheck “Require Application Addins to be signed by a Trusted Publisher” then click OK as many times as needed to get back to Excel.

You may also want to check that your Windows installation is up to date. Please ensure that you have installed the following files from Microsoft:

Download Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 from Official Microsoft Download Center

Latest supported Visual C++ Redistributable downloads | Microsoft Learn (choose the link in the table row labelled x64).

If you still have issues, please contact us.