Excel 1.5

[AdrianP]

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel Just wondered if anybody new a way of converting I assume it is excel 1.5 (its from my thesis in 1990) files so that they can be used in excel 2008 any help would be greatly appreciated thanks Adrian

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Adrian:

What makes you think Excel 2008 can't open them?

1) Make sure the files have the correct extension.

2) Use File>Open from inside Excel to open them.

They should open straight up. Double-clicking in the Finder is always a
little bit of a lottery, because you are depending on two or three
applications that are not made by Microsoft to correctly identify and
dispatch a Microsoft file format. Works fine in the later versions, but can
lead to excitement in the older versi0ns.

Hope this helps

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel Just wondered
if anybody new a way of converting I assume it is excel 1.5 (its from my
thesis in 1990) files so that they can be used in excel 2008 any help would be
greatly appreciated thanks Adrian

--

The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]

 

[AdrianP]

Thanks John for the quick reply but no it doesnt work, when opened under the file menu it brings back an error "Excel does not recognise this file format"
When opening it through the file menu it recognises it as an excel file. In the Info for the file it calls the file type Microsoft Excel.app document hope this gives you more clues
Adrian

 

[John McGhie]

OK, we need to know what is actually in there before we can go any further.

Open the file in TextEdit by using File>Open...

You will get a heap of junk. Give me the very last line in the file, which
will appear something like this:

Microsoft Office Excel WorksheetBiff8 Excel.Sheet.8

That tells me exactly what you have there, and then I can suggest how to get
the content out.

Best cheers

Thanks John for the quick reply but no it doesnt work, when opened under the
file menu it brings back an error "Excel does not recognise this file format"
When opening it through the file menu it recognises it as an excel file. In
the Info for the file it calls the file type Microsoft Excel.app document hope
this gives you more clues
Adrian

--

The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]

 

[AdrianP]

John opened up the files in textedit as you suggested the file was 167kb in size it was a series of tables, the line you mentioned above was not there in any form (but the file was recognised as being excel).
 the last two lines are as follows
ˇ

 

[AdrianP]

sorry John the remaining part of the message is
ˇ

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Adrian:

Well, without a line that says "Microsoft Excel ... " in it, the file is
actually NOT any kind of Excel file, which would be why Excel can't read it.

That line must be there, or Excel can't access the file.

It is usually the very bottom line in the file, but it can be anywhere
within the last 500 bytes of the file.

Hope this helps

John opened up the files in textedit as you suggested the file was 167kb in
size it was a series of tables, the line you mentioned above was not there in
any form (but the file was recognised as being excel).
the last two lines are as follows
ˇ

--

The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel Just
wondered if anybody new a way of converting I assume it is excel 1.5
(its from my thesis in 1990) files so that they can be used in excel
2008 any help would be greatly appreciated thanks Adrian

Excel 1.5 was an ancient version. Excel stopped being able to read
version 1.5 files around version 4 or so. Search the internet, there may
be some utilities available to convert it to a readable form.

 

[AdrianP]

Thanks Bob for your help will keep searching

 

[CyberTaz]

The best I know of is MacLink Plus Deluxe (Dataviz), but even that only goes
back to v2.0: http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/mlp_xlators.html

Good Luck |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[ovalking]

You will get a heap of junk. Give me the very last line in the file, which
will appear something like this:

Microsoft Office Excel WorksheetBiff8 Excel.Sheet.8

I was intrigued by this technique. So I opened some files in BBEdit.

An Excel 4 file does not have the word Excel anywhere in it.

An Excel 5 file had
'Microsoft Excel\0@\0\0\0\0h÷/造
@\0\0\0Äÿáe\0-«
@\0\0\0\0*' but it wasn't at the end.

The last line of both was real data.

G.