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Cannot open XLSX files from external drive

Hi,


I have a macbook running El Capitan that has Office 365 installed, with the latest version of excel. Recently i have been unable to open excel (.xlsx) files from my external hard drive as it gives me a message stating it is corrupt and offering an option to repair - which also fails. I can however;


- Open the same file on a windows 10 PC

- Open the file in Numbers

- Open any other file on the hard drive (Word docs, PDFS, images etc) natively with no issues

- Crucially, i can copy the file to the desktop and it opens in Excel with no problems.


I am at a loss of what this could be.


thanks


(apologies if this is in the wrong section)

MacBook, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)

Posted on Feb 19, 2016 2:10 AM

Reply
3 replies

Feb 19, 2016 2:29 AM in response to Reed20v

Microsoft do not follow all the rules/guidelines/etc. for developing software on OS X and this has historically caused all sorts of strange error messages with regards to opening and saving files. (Microsoft do not follow all their own rules even on Windows.)


As an example even though OS X itself can cope with very long files names and file paths Word and Excel on a Mac have had issues with this. Therefore have a look at the following possibilities.


  • Is the name of the external disk long or containing none numeric/alphabetic characters
  • Is the file inside a lot of folders inside folders inside folders on the disk
  • Does the file itself have a long name or contain none numeric/alphabetic characters


(It is best not to use quotation symbols, speech marks, slashes either forwards or backwards, ampersands i.e. & or basically most none typical characters in file/disk/folder names.)


The file path is made up of the disk name plus all the folder names plus the file name all added together, it is the total length plus the separator symbol. (Either a forward slash or a colon i.e. : .)

Cannot open XLSX files from external drive

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