Excel in Office X: file saved in strange format

L

Lurch

Last July (before applying the Office X 10.1.5 update) I entered some
charitable contribution data in Excel, saved the worksheet, and forgot
about it. Now at tax time I find two files saved from that session.
One has an .xls extension and 0 kB. The other has a .clf extension and
12 kB. The first opens in Excel but is, as would be expected, empty.
The second won't open in anything, but can be imported into Excel as
ASCII. It appears to contain my data intermixed with a LOT of
unprintable characters.

I need the data, and don't want this to happen again. Anyone have
thoughts on a) why Excel saved the file in some exotic unusable format
in the first place and b) how I might recover the data without picking
through an ASCII file character by character and re-entering the whole
mess?

I was running Office X on an 800 MHz TiBook (G4) under Mac OS X
10.2.6, the most recent update at the time the files were created.
Running 10.2.8 now.
 

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