I believe I got this one figured out today. Putting together my own experience and what I saw others post online what I believe it is is that Quickbooks simply doesn't work with 64-bit version of Excel.

What made me extremely frustrated is that I believe that Intuit knows about this bug but will not acknowledge it, nor will it authorize the phone support to tell the customers about it. I spent over an hour on the phone doing pointless repairs and updates when I believe the phone rep knew from the beginning what was going on but because of the company policy was not allowed to directly tell me. After spending all that time on the phone and reading different online posts about the same problem I was able to figure out what to do from what she was not telling me. Basically I just had to uninstall 64-bit version of Office and install 32-bit version, that's all, no updates or repairs necessary, it works with 32-bit version and doesn't work with 64-bit version, that's all there is to it.

Intuit/community admins please understand that I am not trying to put down the phone representative who diligently and to the best of her ability honestly tried to help. What I am saying that while my overall long-term experience with Quickbooks has been very much a positive one and while generally I had very good experience when I needed tech support this is an example of poor customer service. If you can't fix a bug at least put up some kind of notice about it and don't waste our time!