Excel Data Workstation "Sorry we couldn't find..."

Symptom

You receive an error message similar to the below when attempting to open Excel or load the Excel Data Workstation.

Resolution

The registry will need to be edited and ensure that the excel environment variables are correct. The registry item "OPEN" tells excel (or other Office products), which add-ins to open and in which order.

In this registry example image below, “Open1” is pointing to an old/incorrect version of the plugin. It is important to note that the OPEN entries MUST remain sequential, Office will stop loading add-ins when the sequence ends, so for example if you needed to delete an OPEN2 entry, the add-in for OPEN3 would not load (so you would rename those latter entries)

Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\(VERSION - in this case it is 16)\Excel\Options\
Right-click on “Open1” and delete it (in this case Open2 and Open3 are the same version of the plugin for some reason, so for this example we will also delete Open2)
Once deleted, we will be left with OPEN and OPEN3, which has the correct path and plugin
Right-click and rename that to be “Open1”, otherwise excel will not launch the plugin because it looks for the Open sequence (starting with just OPEN, then OPEN1, etc…).
If you have additional plugins that have "open" variables, you just need to make sure they are in sequence: the OE Plugin does not need to be "Open1", for example, but it will need to follow a chain of Open variables if you have multiple plugins.