This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
I recently bought Office for Mac running 10.12.6. I have many files with names like, "Portfolio 4/30/17" saved on my old Mac and old Excel but the new Excel will not open them. It actually will open one and call it "17" but it thinks they are all named "17" and won't open any others. How do I fix Excel to work with my old files and save new files with similar names?
A family of Microsoft spreadsheet software with tools for analyzing, charting, and communicating data.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Answer accepted by question author
Hi David,
We suggest you rename the file since the file name cannot contain "/" character.
You can refer to this thread: "Excel cannot open this workbook. The file name or path contains invalid characters. (For example, /)"
Regards,
Tisky
Answer accepted by question author
Hi David,
Based on this article OS X: Cross-platform filename best practices and conventions, you should avoid using colons and slashes in the names of files and folders because some operating systems and drive formats use these characters as directory separators.
Regards,
Tisky
Special characters are "operators." The slash, in particular, is a file path separator. As far back as I can remember (which is much longer than I care to admit), the general advice has been to avoid special characters in volume names, folder names, file names, sheet tab names and column names. You are simply showing that the general advice was good and should be observed.
This might be a temporary work-around, but I have hundreds of files with / in the names. They all worked just fine on my old Mac running 10.9.5 and Excel for Mac 15, and they all work fine in Apache OpenOffice 3 on my new Mac running 10.12.6.
I would like a real fix, not a work-around. Since when did / become an invalid character? Can't I fix it somehow? Do I have to shift to only using OpenOffice?