Set Up Microsoft Edge to Work with Catalyst

Error message: Frozen "Processing..." screen and/or spinning browser and blank EBM popup. Users will unexpectedly see that their browser tab with the Catalyst instance open will get stuck in a processing loop and continue to spin into perpetuity. In addition, when attempting to open the downloaded Excel cube file, the EBM Office Bridge pop-up dialog window will remain blank.

Description:

• Beginning in June 2022, Microsoft will start to sunset Internet Explorer and replace it with Microsoft Edge. EBM and Catalyst have historically used Internet Explorer to connect to the website in the background, which is a fairly common practice amongst most Microsoft-partnered organizations. Since IE will no longer be available for our source code to call upon, it's important to understand that your local machine may need to be reconfigured to avoid the use of IE moving forward. 
• If your machine is not reconfigured, then you may experience several errors when trying to connect to Catalyst and EBM in your Excel-based cube files. This may include but is not limited to the above error. Here are some other ways these errors may manifest. 

Solution:

This is an issue with the relationship between Microsoft Internet Explorer, which Catalyst uses in the background, and the newer version of that browser which is called Microsoft Edge. Despite IE being sunsetted, we still want to make sure that IE is being called in the background.

• The fix is to open Microsoft Edge and go to Settings > Default Browser > Internet Explorer compatibility > Let Internet Explorer open sites in Microsoft Edge > set the option to "Never". It saves automatically.