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I can't open excel file on a mac!

Hey All,


I have been working on an excel file using both a mac and a pc. However, today I can't seem to open the file on my macbook (snowleopard) but I CAN open it on a PC. What is going on? I need to be able to open the file on my mac and a pc. At first I thought it was because I am running out a memory on my mac, however I tried opening the file on a desktop mac with a lot of memory, but the same thing seems to happen. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on????

Posted on Oct 24, 2011 7:59 PM

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11 replies

Oct 24, 2011 8:05 PM in response to Chiccaboomberry

First, can you open any other excel file on your mac?


Second, what does "can't open" exactly mean? Can you see it when you try to search for the file? Can you drop the file on the excell.app icon? Does an error message get reported when you try to open? In other words describe in more detail what is (or is not) happening. There's nothing much to go on when all you say "it don't work".

Oct 24, 2011 8:18 PM in response to X423424X

Yes, I can open other excel files on my mac. When I say can't open I mean that I CAN'T OPEN THE FILE IN EXCEL. I get a message saying that I can either see it was read only or notify, but this only happens on a desktop mac, when I try to open it on my macbook I get no message. Excel just freezes. I was thinking it was the size of the files but it's only 10mb???? And yes I can search for the files and see it in my documents/usb.


HELP

Oct 24, 2011 8:58 PM in response to Chiccaboomberry

Open Disk Utility (in your Utilities folder).


Select (click) the volume to check on the left panel.


Make sure the First Aid tab is selected in the right panel.


Click Repair Disk button. If it's the boot drive you can only click the verify button. You would need to boot from some other drive to repair the boot drive (e.g., your installer dvd). Verify is good enough to see if there are any problems with a disk. Repair does that first itself to decide whether it has to do a repair.


After the button is clicked DU does its thing and displays its progress in the right panel and at the end tells you whether it's "happy" with what it found or did.

Oct 25, 2011 3:20 AM in response to X423424X

Thanks for that!


So I did what you said and I got a message saying that there is something wrong with my disk and that I should start up my computer with a new disk (e.g., my Mac OSX installation disk) and then run the disk utility or something like that.


I recently upgraded my OS from Tiger to Snow Leopard, so do I just pop in my Snow Leopard installation disk and then restart my computer? Then do I run the Disk Utility to fix it?


Will I lose anything? (i.e., my files, music etc)


Thanks so much!

Oct 25, 2011 5:23 AM in response to Chiccaboomberry

Yes, use the SL retail disc; hold down the C key on start up (wait for the chime if it's a bluetooth keyboard) until the Apple logo appears.


OK the language page, then ignore the installer and go to the menu bar, Utilities menu > Disk Utility.


Booted from the DVD you will now be able to use the 'Repair Disk' button to repair the HD.

Run 'Repair Disk' again after repairs have been reported, until the green message "The Volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK" appears.


Then Quit DU, quit the installer and restart from Macintosh HD.


There should be no loss of data, but you should always have a backup of that anyway.


If a message appears saying DU can't repair the drive, repost here for further instructions.

Oct 25, 2011 9:31 AM in response to Chiccaboomberry

Before you do, try http://www.neooffice.org/ or http://docs.google.com/ on a copy of the file. Both are able to import Microsoft Excel files and read most of their information and aren't as sensitive to codes that Microsoft may have added to the documents. If one of them can read the document and you don't have anything more special than formulas and field formatting (i.e. no specialized tables or Macros) to save, see if exporting the file back to an Excel document and reopening in Excel works better.

Dec 11, 2016 8:24 PM in response to Chiccaboomberry

I had a similar problem. Turned out Microsoft Excel didn't like the volume name where the document was stored. I had /Volumes/aux/. I noticed that when I renamed the volume to /Volumes/faux/ that everything worked again and changing it back to /Volumes/aux/ would consistently result in the following errors:

When opening an existing document in /Volumes/aux/

Microsoft Office Excel cannot access the file <filename>. There are several possible reasons:

- The file name or path does not exist.

- The file is being used by another program.

- The workbook you are trying to save has the same name as a currently open workbook.

When saving a new document to /Volumes/aux/

Alert Document not saved


Hope this helps someone

I can't open excel file on a mac!

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