Workaround: Excel hangs when launching MSQuery

This seems to be a problem for a lot of people, as there are at lot of pages asking how to fix this issue. The issue is that when you want to create a new query or edit a query that pulls data into Excel, Excel will attempt to launch MSQuery and hang, only displaying the message "waiting for data to be returned from microsoft query".

Here is a very simple workaround:

1) First of all, create your query in MSQuery directly, then save the query somewhere.

2) Go to Excel, select Data --> Import External Data --> Import Data

3) In the "Select Data Source" dialog box, do not select the odbc connection to the db, instead select the query you created in MSQuery.

That's it, the data will now import correctly, and the profile will save into your Excel worksheet as normal. Just thought I'd share this as I haven't seen a solution posted anywhere.