fileformat error when opening xls files

[nofish]

H
When trying to open some of our xls files I got the error filenamn.xls:-filformat is not valid (the error is in Swedish so this is my best guess) we use exel 97, I have tried to change extensions and then back again, different clients and alot more and the files seams corrupt. thanks/Kim

 

[Dave Peterson]

Sometimes excel workbooks get corrupted.

One cause is opening them from a floppy and saving to that floppy. (Instead you
should use windows explorer to copy to your harddrive/LAN drive), work on it
from there, save it there and use windows explorer to copy it back to the
floppy.)

Another is opening the workbook in MSWord and saving it as an MSWord document
(with a .xls extension).

If you did the MSWord thing, you maybe able to recover a little bit of your
data by opening it in MSWord and copying and then pasting to excel. (But tons
of stuff may be lost.)

And sometimes the workbooks just get corrupted.

You might be able to recover more by using another program--both xl2002 and
OpenOffice have better reputations for opening files that earlier versions of
excel couldn't.

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

If the file is really important, there are commercial recovery services. I've
never used it, but you might want to check into:
http://www.officerecovery.com

Any chance you have a backup version or emailed a version to someone who could
email it back?

 

[nofish]

Thanks for reply,
The one thing I can imagine has happend is maby someone open the xls in MSWord but thats not likely as you have to choose all files when to get that to work, can this has something to do that we are using citrix metaframe
It's a small group of ppl that have this problem 2 times in a short period of time, other than that nobody else have the problem
I was able to open the xlsfiles in MSWord, the recovery program stated (OLE document status is broken) and could not recover any data
thanks /kim

 

[Dave Peterson]

I don't know anything about citrix, but I do know that it's easy to open a
workbook in Word and save it (or have word's autosave save it).

Can you right click on the file in windows explorer and examine the properties?

Maybe looking at the "last saved by" on the Statistics tab would lead you closer
to the solution.

 

[nofish]

Thank you Dave, you where right there, booth files are showing up as word 8.0 files and that's abit wierd as we only use word 7.0 in the summary info.