Numbers says can't open file for some reason

I've been having this same issue intermittently for the last few months. It just came back this morning with a Numbers spreadsheet that I just created on my Mac, and then it's "can't be opened for some reason" on my iPad or iPhone. It says to restore it to a previous version, but when I try this it says it can't connect to iCloud. It is connecting to iCloud just fine for other files and all my other iCloud functions.

I just filed a ticket with Apple on this.

Then, I tried something different. Instead of opening up Numbers on my iOS device and choosing the file there, I went over to the iCloud app in my iPad, and then navigated through my folders that I have on iCloud Drive, and selected it there. And you guessed it, it popped open just fine in Numbers on the iPad. I tried the same thing on my iPhone, and this also worked there. There is definitely a glitch here.

I've got the same problem with a 1.1GB Numbers file. I downloaded it from a shared (with a trusted source) folder in OneDrive. The file icon appears as the Numbers bar chart logo. I'm able to open other smaller Numbers files.

I'm on a Macbook Pro, OSX El Capitan 10.11.6.

Can someone help pls - my business relies on this!

I ´ve the same problem. I´ve updated to Numbers 4.0, and now i can´t open some files with the same error message.

I don't even get an error message! They just don't open. Nothing happens. You mean I have to use a program other than Numbers, to look at my Numbers files?!!

Finally found a solution ... if you use time machine, try going back to version 3.6.2 of iWork Numbers - Sierra upgrades to version 4.0 that's the root cause of the "cannot open for some reason" issue.

Once I moved back to version 3.6.2 of numbers, the files that were throwing up an error opened just fine on OSX Sierra. Now I have to figure out how to get them to open up on iOS since there's no easy way of going back to prior versions of the iOS apps ...

Hope this helps.

Same here. Can't open any of my Numbers files with the new version of Numbers on Sierra, iOS or Web version. Seriously bad, Apple. I can't get to my budget without relying on a slightly old Excel format export. Wow.

Is there any way to fix the issue if I don't use Time Machine? All but one of the Numbers files that I have will not open, and the one that will open will not export to Excel (it says I don't have permission, even though I have "Read and Write" permission). Thankfully the one I'm able to open contains the most data, but I don't want to close it in case it won't open again.

The files started opening again! I'm not sure what I did, but I'm not complaining!