Worksheet will not open after upgrade to Excel 2008 for Mac

[henry_the_cat]

Can anyone help with this problem?
After upgrading to Office 2008 for Mac one of my worksheets (my invoicing file – therefore very important to me) will not open.
On double-click the opening process begins. The loading bar flashes for a fraction of a second and then – nothing.
Excel is active, but there is no sign of the document. The menu items that would normally be active when a document has opened are dimmed to grey.
Back up versions of the same file show the same behavior.
Outside of Excel:
The preview, in the information panel for the file (finder), shows and empty page with the letters XLS at the bottom (the preview for other files show content). Permissions are all ‘read and write’.
Luckily, I have an older version of Excel on another Mac. All versions of the file open in the older Excel. I have tried re-saving the file, on the older Mac, in various formats and as a template. So far nothing as worked on the entire file.
What works:
Copying worksheets one at a time to a new workbook file and then saving seems to work. Dragging and dropping using the worksheet tabs also worked, but when I attempted to open the document Excel crashed. A double click opened the document normally.
I have not found any other threads dealing with this issue, so maybe it is just this one file. If there is an easy answer I would be pleased to hear of it – and maybe it can help someone else too.
Cheers
HTC.

 

[henry_the_cat]

To answer my own question (in case anyone else has the same problem):
I began reconstructing the workbook, a few worksheets at a time, by copying worksheets into a new Excel workbook in Office 2004, then saving and testing to see if it would open in office 2008.

This localized the problem to two worksheets in the workbook. When I copied either one of these pages to a new workbook the workbook would open in Office 2004, but not in Office 2008.

I then traced the problem to a single cell, which was present in both of the worksheets. The cell was empty of text, but there were two carriage returns there.

Other than this, there was no visible thing to cause the problem. After deleting the contents of the cell, the document opened as normal in both versions of office.

Pretty simple little thing, but the process took about 3 hours.

HTC

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

To answer my own question (in case anyone else has the same problem):
I began reconstructing the workbook, a few worksheets at a time, by copying
worksheets into a new Excel workbook in Office 2004, then saving and testing
to see if it would open in office 2008.

This localized the problem to two worksheets in the workbook. When I copied
either one of these pages to a new workbook the workbook would open in Office
2004, but not in Office 2008.

I then traced the problem to a single cell, which was present in both of the
worksheets. The cell was empty of text, but there were two carriage returns
there.

Other than this, there was no visible thing to cause the problem. After
deleting the contents of the cell, the document opened as normal in both
versions of office.

Pretty simple little thing, but the process took about 3 hours.

HTC

This sounds like workbook corruption of some kind. I just built a few
workbooks with empty cells except for double carriage returns, and they
opened and saved fine. I suspect there was something else there that was not
visible. Glad you got it working.