For those of you that still have to deal with Office 2003 in a MOSS 2007 environment, here’s an error that had caused a couple weeks of grief as I worked with 5+ different Microsoft Support Engineers to figure out. You would think that Microsoft would have a catalog of these error messages and what they mean but apparently not as we had to figure this out the hard way through trial and error.

Error Message:

Another user has changes the structure of the list. Your changes  can no longer  be published to the SharePoint list.

Excel 2003 SharePoint Sync Error

Root Cause Analysis:

The error occurs when the user has a spreadsheet that is out of sync with the SharePoint List. When this spreadsheet contains an item that had been deleted from the List and the user tries to update the item in the spreadsheet with new values, it will cause the error. If the item was not modified in the spreadsheet, it will sync without error and remove the item from the spreadsheet to match the SharePoint List. Also the List will be properly updated in the SharePoint List regardless of whether or not the error occurs. If new items are added to the SharePoint List, the spreadsheet will be updated accordingly without error.

To reproduce:
1. Export and link the List to Excel 2003.
2. Delete a List Item from the List.
3. From Excel 2003, try to update the same exact item that had been deleted. Sync the spreadsheet back to the SharePoint List.

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