Error e-mailing PDF reports with GP 2010 and Office 2010

I was recently trying to setup and test e-mailing vendor remittance documents for a client that is setting up Electronic Funds Transfer for Payables.

When I tested the process on one of my servers, I received the following error:

You must have the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office installed to send documents

I tried e-mailing other documents as PDF, such as a sales invoice, but received the same error throughout GP.

Since I have Office 2010 installed, clearly the message about Office 2007 is erroneous, but it obviously indicates that GP is unable to e-mail the reports as PDFs.  And I confirmed that I did have the 32-bit versions of Office 2010 installed, as the 64-bit version is not compatible with GP 2010 R2 for e-mailing reports.

I read a forum post indicating that at least a handful of other people have experienced this error, but there didn't appear to be any consensus on a cause or resolution.

I was able to e-mail the reports as DOCX files, so the e-mail process worked, but the conversion to PDF wasn't working.

So I installed 32-bit Office 2010 with default settings on a second server with GP 2010 R2 and tested e-mailing reports as PDFs.  It worked fine on the second server, no errors.  Hmmm.  So my issue was clearly server-specific.

I began to think that my Office 2010 installation was probably the issue.  I have a habit of trying to remove as much junk as possible from the Office installation--it installs hundreds of "features" that I never use and consider useless.  But perhaps I was a bit too aggressive and excluded a component that GP requires to do it's magic converting Word Templates to PDF for e-mailing.

After two tries adding back components to my Office 2010 installation, I found the item that was causing the problem.

In the Office 2010 Installation Options window, under Microsoft Word, there is an item called ".NET Programmability Support".

 
I almost never use .NET to program Word or interact with Word, so I had excluded that item from my Office installation.

I set the feature to be installed, completed the Office setup, and then launched GP 2010 R2.  Sure enough, I was able to e-mail PDF attachments from within GP.  Worked like a charm.

Presumably there are relatively few people that are as picky as me when it comes to installing useless Office features, so this is probably a rare cause of this particular error.  But just a note that the Word 2010 .NET Programmability Support feature is required in order for GP 2010 to do it's PDF e-mailing magic.

There are other causes for this error,  such as the obscure case that Dave Dusek explains in this blog post, so the one I experienced is just one possible explanation.


Steve Endow is a Dynamics GP Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified IT Professional in Los Angeles.  He is also the owner of Precipio Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and automation solutions.

http://www.precipioservices.com