After I Update to IOS 7.1 I can't open the excel file attached in my email

Hi there,

I was experiencing this problem as well. What I found is that if you scroll to the bottom of the email message and select 'download entire message' the Excel file will then download completly. What you are seeing previous to that is a 'preview' of the document. Hope this helps.

Y

I hoped this might solve the problem but it didn't - in this specific email, I do not see a 'download entire message' selection, just the excel attachement. When I open the attachment, over a gray screen I see the name of the file followed by the format, "Microsoft Excel 97-2004" worksheet, and the size. Could it be the format?

Any other solutions out there?

Hi Alex,

The trick to this whole thing is to scroll to the bottom of the message. There should be a dashed line at the bottom of the email message with text underneath it that says, "This message was downloaded as plain text." Underneath that it should say (in blue hyperlink text) "Download full message". Select that hyperlink, and the Excel file should download completely. You should then be able to select the document and have it open correctly.

I have had the same concern regardless of file format that is sent, so I do not believe your issue is with file format. Hope this helps.

David_PDX wrote:

Hi Alex,

The trick to this whole thing is to scroll to the bottom of the message. There should be a dashed line at the bottom of the email message with text underneath it that says, "This message was downloaded as plain text." Underneath that it should say (in blue hyperlink text) "Download full message". Select that hyperlink, and the Excel file should download completely. You should then be able to select the document and have it open correctly.

I have had the same concern regardless of file format that is sent, so I do not believe your issue is with file format. Hope this helps.

I've seen the same thing happen with images, which it displays in a corrupted form. It's fixed by downloading the full message.

There's a more serious side effect of this, which I've now seen with several types of files. If one FORWARDS the email to someone else, the attached files it sends them are CORRUPTED and unopenable too. In the case of a Word files I looked at, it had dropped the last two bytes of the file.

The workaround for that is to download the full message before forwarding.

I'm seeing this happening with so many types of attachments that I'm assuming it affects them all. Please everyone report this to Apple feedback (http://www.apple.com/feedback/). It's one thing not being able to open a file on your device, it's another to have files corrupted permanently just by forwarding.

pshute wrote:

There's a more serious side effect of this, which I've now seen with several types of files. If one FORWARDS the email to someone else, the attached files it sends them are CORRUPTED and unopenable too. In the case of a Word files I looked at, it had dropped the last two bytes of the file.

The workaround for that is to download the full message before forwarding.

I just had what appears to be this same problem with some pdf files that someone had forwarded to them by an iPad user. Later examination showed that about 1KB of a 1MB pdf file was missing, but we spent a while trying to diagnose it first.

Acrobat was able to open the file, but when we tried to print it, it would appear to run through the process ok, and then would say "The document could not be printed", then "There were no pages selected to print", then sometimes "Insufficiant data for an image". Sometimes a couple of pages would print.

When we got hold of the original pdf file, it would print ok.

I am having the same issue of not being able to open the excel file from in mail. I have done the "download complete message" and this helps with pdf's but not my excel files. When trying to open in other apps, I get the message "Unable to read document. Unknown exception". It does open on may desktop computer just fine. Have also done the hard shutdown of both phone and ipad.