Troubleshooting

To carry your customizations into the new version, we need the source copy of your MSC-LIMS front end — the file named LimsCode5.mdb. This sheet gives you three ways to track it down, in the order most likely to work.

Q: “On more than one occasion, we have received a sample summary report as evidence of a sample with all analyses completed yet no completed date. For a site using LIMS Messaging to send completed results this posed a problem. How could...

Q: “One of our users got a new PC. … We installed the program, logged her in with the admin and attached the database we’re using, but she still can’t log in with her credentials. We’re obviously missing something.”

Recently, a lab manager asked why some of her LIMS workstations showed the sample ID and collected date on the Results by Analyte screen while other workstations showed sample ID and location. The answer lies in the use of the Display fi...

A user noticed that one employee’s login name was now automatically inserted in the Technician field instead of her initials.

When exporting data from an LIMS report to an Excel template, cell formats unexpectedly change when the final report worksheet is displayed.

Verify or try the following steps to allow other workstations to connect to a SQL Server instance. Use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to test the connection between a workstation and SQL Server after each step below until the connec...

Client has Office365 accounts, but not connected to a domain active directory (this means that when you view the Users in SSMS>[Database]>Security>Users and in LIMS>Admin>Users the primary user (will look like this: “AzureAD\Username” vs...

You are receiving analysis results flagged with an ‘H’ for high or ‘L’ for low on final reports even though you have since changed your analysis specifications (i.e. result and warning min and max) in related projects.

Changing or Disabling High, Low, and BDL Result Formats When formatting results for reports, LIMS will append a space and “H” for high or “L” for low if a result value is above or below the warning limits configured for the analysis. If...

Have you seen either of these warnings? A version of these messages originated with LIMS 2.0 in 1999, when personal computers had far less random access memory (RAM) than today’s typical workstation. However, these messages still serve a...

A runtime error may occur in the results entry screens when importing results from Excel. Note that the error may be limited to a specific workstation in a multi-user installation and will only occur with LIMS version 3.3...

Issue: Users can successfully log in to LIMS, but when you check the Admin> Users screen you cannot see a user and their role.

During system startup the error message “Unable to attach LIMSDATA.MDB or its location may have changed” is displayed if either the location of LIMSDATA has been changed or the file is corrupt. This article describes how to correct the e...

During system startup, LIMS checks the compiled state of the system’s Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) project. The VBA project contains all code modules including code behind forms and reports. When the VBA project is not in a compil...

The “Import” checkbox on the Excel Data Import form is read-only. You cannot uncheck it.

When receiving this error message when creating a new import or export template, there are a few things that you will want to verify:

This error points to an issue with the Microsoft Access installation on the workstation, and until this is resolved, LIMS will not function properly.

Check out this article from one of our developers to help troubleshoot SQL Server connection errors: https://nolongerset.com/troubleshooting-sql-server-connections

When importing results from an Excel Template (either from Batch Login or Results by Analyte), each Analyte in the template must have a corresponding record in the Analysis table (Main Menu: Setup > Analyses ).

If you suspect network issues may be the cause of slow query performance or other errors, perform a simple test with a local copy of LimsData to determine whether the network is the culprit.

Use the Audit Trail report on the Samples menu to see who deleted samples and the date, time, and reason they were deleted.

How to create a .bak backup file of your SQL Server database and compress it into a ZIP file to send to support for review.