Error "Method Post of object IOWSPostData failed" when import Excel as new list

Question

We are using SharePoint 2013 on-premise standard edition. Our users desktop have Office 2010 installed.

Recently user test the import Excel spreadsheet into SharePoint 2013 list function. He tested with a very simple Excel sheet. However when he selected some cells and click "Import" button, error "Method Post of object IOWSPostData failed" is prompted.

1. I found the same error on Internet but all of them are about older version SharePoint.

2. We tested create a subsite and then import the same Excel again. No error is occur.

Why is that?

Answer 1

It happened to be an old bug (or old design) of SharePoint.

The site collection with import problem have URL http://sharepoint.com/sites/ABC/. It happened that every site collections under same web application cannot import Excel. Also every subsite (e.g. http://sharepoint.com/sites/ABC/subsite/) can import Excel without problem.

My gut feeling told me to check our web application root (http://sharepoint.com/) and found the site collection was deleted during my previous test. It is just a dummy site contain nothing so I do not pay much attention before. After I recreate the site collection with a normal team site template, everything is back to work as before.

I believe the root cause is the "Import Excel" function make use of some Macro to import from Excel. However it assume you have root site collection created.