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Excel 2011 can't open old Excel 98 and Excel X files

I have lots of old Excel workbooks that were created on my Mac that go back at least as far as 1999. They were created in 1998 Excel 8.0 (from Office 98), 2000 Excel 9.0 (from Office 2001), and 2001 Excel 10.0 (from Office v.X) (I'm assuming these were the versions I used way back then because I have always used Office since the beginning of time.) Excel 2011 will not open these files. When I try to open these files, I get the message:



Excel could not open [filename] because some content is unreadable. Do you want to open and repair this workbook? If excel cannot repair the file, some data may be lost.



If I click Open and Repair, Excel hangs.



Of course, being a Mac user since 1983, these files do not have those ugly extensions hanging on the file name, but that really isn't the problem. I can add extensions (like .xls) to the file name, which changes the appearance of the icon, but Excel still hangs when trying to Open and Repair these files.


Can someone explain what the problem is?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on May 2, 2012 6:30 AM

Reply
5 replies

May 2, 2012 7:04 AM in response to Fred L Johnson

Some of those are pretty ancient!


Did you ever install the converter?


Mac users using Word 2004 who receive a Word 2008 for Mac, (or Word 2007 for Windows) document, will not be able to read this without having the Open XML Converter installed, which can be downloaded from Microsoft.


Go to this page:


http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx


and click on the right under Most Popular, 'Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.2'


This opens a window at the bottom of the page. Scroll that to the bottom and click on English.dmg, and it will download for you as a disk image, which can be installed in the usual way.


After installation you can open and read .xml formatted Word 2008 documents in Word 2004.


Update: This link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976831 takes you to a newer version 1.1.3 (released Nov 10, 2009).

Sep 9, 2012 7:02 PM in response to Fred L Johnson

It might help people that have visited via Google that this error can also be reported if somehow your files really have been corrupted.

Check their size, they might say "zero K".

This indicates that the Resource Fork an Data Fork have been split.

You're looking at an icon for a file that isn't "whole". Perhaps you've copied them from a Windows-based server? If so, check the server for the missing fork. e.g.


Filename.xlsx

.Filename.xlsx <- this one with the"." needs to be copied to your mac as well.


When you copy both files to the mac, it is "complete" and the mac only shows you one icon.


Good luck.

Sep 10, 2012 4:12 AM in response to connectionfailure

These files were not corrupted.


I never closed the discussion with what I learned. My problem was indeed a not-backwards-compatible issue. This issue was escalated within Microsoft and I got the answer that Excel 2011 simply will not open these old files. The work around was that I had to take these files to a Windows machine using Excel 2007, open each file, resave each file as an Excel 2007 version, take the files back to my Mac, open each one in Excel 2011, and resave on my computer. Of course, I really didn't have to open them once I got them into Excel 2007, but I did for most. (I'm not sure if this would work on a later version of Excel for Windows.)

Excel 2011 can't open old Excel 98 and Excel X files

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