Corupted file? "Unable to read file"

J

jcreaney

I am receiving the following error message when trying to open an excel
file.

"Unable to read file"

The file contains pivot tables, but no links to external files.
Passwords protect both the file and the sheets within.
The file was created using Excel 98, however I am trying to open it
using Excel 2002.

Any ideas would be greatly received.

Thanks
 
P

Paul

jcreaney said:
I am receiving the following error message when trying to open an excel
file.

"Unable to read file"

The file contains pivot tables, but no links to external files.
Passwords protect both the file and the sheets within.
The file was created using Excel 98, however I am trying to open it
using Excel 2002.

Any ideas would be greatly received.

Thanks
Click to expand...

This message means that the file is corrupted, i.e. that it was not
correctly written to the disk. For practical purposes it is unusable. You
would need specialist (forensic-type) techniques to retrieve any parts of it
that are intact. I hope you have a backup copy; if not, I'm sorry, but you
have now learned the importance of backups.

As an aside, file corruption often happens if you try to save a file direct
from Excel to a floppy (or open one direct from a floppy). You should always
work from/to hard disk, and copy to/from removable media using Windows
Explorer or similar.
 
D

Dave Peterson

If you opened that workbook in word and saved it in word, then it's a word file
now (albeit with a .xls extension).

If you did this, you may be able to recover some stuff by opening the file in
Word and copy|pasting to a new workbook in excel--but lots may be lost.

Did you get the error message when you did a File|open inside excel or when you
double clicked on it in windows explorer? (Try file|open at least once.)

And a few people have reported success using OpenOffice to
open their workbooks and recover both the worksheet data and macro code:

http://www.openoffice.org, a 60-65 meg download or a CD
 
Top