How can a .xls file be opened? What do I need?

M

msolis

I received e-mails containing attachments ending in .xls that I cannot view.
What exactly do I need? Do I need Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel...?
 
H

Harlan Grove

JoAnn Paules [MVP] wrote...
You either need to buy Excel or if you only need to *view* the file (no
editing), you can download the viewer.

Office Online File Converters and Viewers
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010449811033.aspx
Click to expand...

The viewer may be adequate, but there's no need to buy Excel or Office.
There are a dozen or so spreadsheet programs for Windows that can read
..XLS files, all of which are cheaper than Excel/Office, some of which
are free. The main one is OpenOffice.

If you mean 'should', use 'should'. If you believe you mean 'need', get
your facts right.
 
J

JoAnn Paules [MVP]

There are other programs but you know as well as I do that any time you use
a program to edit a file that wasn't created with that program in the first
place, you're asking for difficulties somewhere done the road.

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]
 
H

Harlan Grove

JoAnn Paules [MVP] wrote...
There are other programs but you know as well as I do that any time you use
a program to edit a file that wasn't created with that program in the first
place, you're asking for difficulties somewhere done the road.
Click to expand...

Maybe, but Excel itself seems to corrupt .XLS files more often than
OpenOffice Calc, or at least Excel proudly reports recovering files
with irritating frequency. When it says it can't recover .XLS files, I
open them in OpenOffice Calc, resave them as .XLS files, then open them
in Excel. At least in the Excel newsgroups, where there are people who
know Excel (warts & all), it's well know that OpenOffice/StarOffice
seem to be more robust than Excel itself when it comes to
opening/recovering .XLS files.

The exceptions are complex formatting and complex array formulas. If
the formatting is minimal but the formulas are complex, better to use
Gnumeric.
 
S

Sten Westerback

Harlan Grove said:
JoAnn Paules [MVP] wrote...

Maybe, but Excel itself seems to corrupt .XLS files more often than
OpenOffice Calc, or at least Excel proudly reports recovering files
with irritating frequency. When it says it can't recover .XLS files, I
open them in OpenOffice Calc, resave them as .XLS files, then open them
in Excel. At least in the Excel newsgroups, where there are people who
know Excel (warts & all), it's well know that OpenOffice/StarOffice
seem to be more robust than Excel itself when it comes to
opening/recovering .XLS files.

The exceptions are complex formatting and complex array formulas. If
the formatting is minimal but the formulas are complex, better to use
Gnumeric.
Click to expand...

One way to, using Excel, fix corruption is to create a new .xls in another
Excel instance and drag the Sheet tabs over to it from the old .xls. Same
trick usually does it for Word.

- Sten
MVP SDK
 
S

Sten Westerback \(MVP SDK\)

Harlan Grove said:
JoAnn Paules [MVP] wrote...

Maybe, but Excel itself seems to corrupt .XLS files more often than
OpenOffice Calc, or at least Excel proudly reports recovering files
with irritating frequency. When it says it can't recover .XLS files, I
open them in OpenOffice Calc, resave them as .XLS files, then open them
in Excel. At least in the Excel newsgroups, where there are people who
know Excel (warts & all), it's well know that OpenOffice/StarOffice
seem to be more robust than Excel itself when it comes to
opening/recovering .XLS files.

The exceptions are complex formatting and complex array formulas. If
the formatting is minimal but the formulas are complex, better to use
Gnumeric.
Click to expand...

One way to, using Excel, fix corruption is to create a new .xls in another
Excel instance and drag the Sheet tabs over to it from the old .xls. Same
trick usually does it for Word.

- Sten
MVP SDK
 
H

Harlan Grove

Sten Westerback wrote...
....
One way to, using Excel, fix corruption is to create a new .xls in another
Excel instance and drag the Sheet tabs over to it from the old .xls. Same
trick usually does it for Word.
Click to expand...

How does one open the corrupt Excel workbook in the first place? Your
approach seems to assume the corrupt file is already open in one Excel
instance. The real world problem occurs when corrupt workbooks aren't
open, the user tries to open them, but Excel won't/can't open them.
Then how do you do this?

And you seem to have your terminology wrong. Dragging worksheets
between workbooks in Excel only works when both workbooks are in the
same Excel instance. Perhaps you mean each document appears separately
in the task bar, and you're confusing that with multiple instances.
 
Top