Symptom

You receive one of the following messages when working with BarTender and Microsoft Excel:

Message 6241

A connection to the database could not be made due to the following:

External table is not in the expected format.

Record Set Error

Message: The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0' Provider is Not Registered on the Local Machine

Environment

Microsoft OS x64

BarTender 2016 x64 (all Excel connections)

BarTender 2019 or later, x64 (connections to .xls Excel documents)

Microsoft Office x64

Solution

The 64-bit version of the Microsoft ACE Database Engine is not installed.

In order to fix this issue, you will need to download and install the Microsoft Access Database Engine.

You can download the file here: Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016 Redistributable

Please make sure that BarTender is closed before installing the Access Database Engine. Once you've installed the engine, you should be able to connect to your Excel file again