"The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.16.0' provider is not registered on the local machine. (System.Data)" after installing

Can anyone help me with this error. I have seen the question asked on here before, but none of the solutions or patches have so far worked. I am in the process of setting up a sql server for my work but I continue to receive this error message: "The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.16.0' provider is not registered on the local machine. (System.Data)"

This and 12.0 are installed already, but I am still not sure as to what is going wrong. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

1 Answer

Follow these steps:

1. Go [here][1], download Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016 Redistributable and install
2. Close SQL Server Management Studio
3. Go to Start Menu -> Microsoft SQL Server 2017 -> SQL Server 2017 Import and Export Data (64-bit)
4. Open the application and try to import data using the "Excel 2016" option, it should work fine.