title: Bloomberg blpapi install
body: <p>I have tried to follow the successful folks processes as described in several prior posts, but no success; a tribute to a most obscure install process.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I've installed blpapi via pip, it reported successfully installed, and shows up in the library list.</li>
  <li>I unzipped the blpapi package from BBG to C:blpapi_cpp; and added C:blpapi_cpp\blpapi_cpp_3.12.3.1\bin to my Win 7 PATH variable.</li>
  <li>I installed the latest version of Visual Studio Tools (2019)</li>
  <li>I successfully installed the SSH key from BBG</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I re-started Anaconda Spyder to make sure it was seeing the latest PATH variable. In the console I tried: import blpapi, and got:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ImportError: 
  ---------------------------- ENVIRONMENT -----------------------------
  Platform: Windows-7-6.1.7601-SP1
  Architecture: ('64bit', 'WindowsPE')
  Python: 3.7.1 (default, Dec 10 2018, 22:54:23) [MSC v.1915 64 bit (AMD64)]
  Python implementation: CPython
  
  blpapi 64-bit will be loaded from: "None"
  blpapi 32-bit will be loaded from: "None"
  System PATH: (* marks locations where blpapi was found)
  
  *long list of paths here, ending with* 
  
      "C:Anaconda3\Scripts"
      "C:blpapi_cpp\blpapi_cpp_3.12.3.1\bin"
  
  blpapi package at: "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages"
  
  Current directory: "C:\Users\Paul Stafford"
  
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  No module named '_versionhelper'
  
  Could not open the C++ SDK library.
  
  Download and install the latest C++ SDK from: 
      http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/api-library
  
  If the C++ SDK is already installed, please ensure that the path to the library
  was added to PATH before entering the interpreter.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I thought that that was what I did, but evidently not.  I'm not well-versed in setting up environments. Is the C++  SDK in the blpapi_cpp package, visual studio, or? It seems all the bits are there, they're just not finding each other. What did I miss?</p>