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Excel repair for Mac

Help!

My very important budget-file is corrupted! I use Excel for Mac 2008 on my Macbook (Mac OS X 10.6.8). I recently used the file but now when I want to open it it says 'The file you are trying to open is possibly read-only or the location you are trying to open is read-only. Or the server you are trying to access is not responding'.

I'm afraid the file is corrupted 😟

What is strange is that there are two other files which all of the sudden have the same issue, all 3 files have the .xls extension instead of .xlsx which I can open without a problem.

I didn't do anything myself to these files?! So is it a question of corruption of wrong extension? No idea!

I've allready tried searching for a program that can repair corrupted excel-files but they don't work on my Mac, are all for Windows OS.

Can anybody help?? I'm getting really desperaty here! It's a very important budget-file, and ofcourse my back-up with Time Machine is from after when i last used the file 😟 😟

Any help would be MUCH appreciated!

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8), excel for mac

Posted on Sep 17, 2011 4:37 AM

Best reply

defender96

Level 1

14 points

Posted on May 21, 2015 8:39 AM

I tried all of these recommendations to no avail. I even went as far as to buy a file repair application (it just crashed repeated). In the end I found that I could open my Excel file in Numbers! I then exported from Numbers back to Excel and voila! Problem solved!

Hope this helps someone!

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17 replies

Jul 21, 2016 6:46 AM in response to lanuguita

This worked for me, except that I just changed it to .xls on the mac and tried to reopen.....it worked. I didn't need to send it over to a windows machine. This just saved me a lot of work!!!!

Oct 13, 2016 12:44 PM in response to Kaatfrombelgium

Finally! I tried repairing Disk permissions in Diskutility.app. I tried turning off auto calculations in Excel. I tried saving as a new file format. I tried opening read only. I downloaded Stellar Phoenix excel repair - it seems to be doing something but it literally does one cell at a time and takes about 3-5 seconds per CELL. I had 23 tabs with a lot of data. Maybe by Christmas I can open it. I even went to a site linked here on the Apple support site that was an online repair solution but when it wasn't clear it was a legit company and when I read the legal terms and it said I am willing to abide by the laws of Russia... I didn't trust sending my confidential doc out to that hosted service. Who knows...

So it is ironic that Numbers is the fix. Now it didn't import my conditional formatting and I see some key formulas that aren't working now (value was pasted in), but overall it seems to be successful. Thanks!!

Excel repair for Mac