I recently came across this and wanted to be sure everyone is aware of this limitation.  With the new release of Office 2010 including 64-bit support, there has been some confusion about which version to install.  Microsoft has been clear in their recommendation:

  1. Install the 32-bit version for most needs to maintain ActiveX control compatibility and other tools
  2. Install the 64-bit version if you use Excel spreadsheets 2 GB in size 

For whatever reason, say you installed Office 2010 64-bit on your machine, and you happily go to your shiny SharePoint 2010 site (or WSS/MOSS), open up a list, and hit Datasheet View.  To your surprise, you see this:

The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view

What?  You make sure you’re in the right IE security zone, all the ActiveX control options are enabled, but no go.  What gives? 

 The Cause

Microsoft is aware of this issue, and documented this KB article 2266203.  Internet Explorer uses an ActiveX control installed by Office to render the Datasheet view functionality in SharePoint, and the Office 2010 64-bit version does not have a version of that ActiveX control.  Awesome!  It’s also documented here:  

Datasheet View

Requires a 64-bit ActiveX control. Microsoft Office 2010 does not provide a 64-bit version of this control.

The Fix

Since you can’t mix 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office, you don’t have many options.  The official recommendation is to remove 64-bit Office, and install the 32-bit version.  You can try the following: 

 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components

 Read the above article for issues with this.  If you are using IE 8 64-bit, you’re just out of luck.