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ONE Excel file does not open.

Anonymous
2015-10-24T19:56:52+00:00

In August I created a worksheet in Mac Excel 2011.   Excel saved it as ".xlsx."   I am now on a different Mac.  I restored everything from back up.  I installed Mac Excel 2016.  Excel 2011 is still on this machine, but it is not activated.  (That is why I have Excel 2016.)   Neither version of Excel opens this one file.  Both applications give me this dialog box:

For troubleshooting, I changed the file suffix to ".xls."  No change.  Excel 2016 could not open that version.

I went back into Time Machine and restored the file from a back up in September.  This "original" version is in ".xlsx."  No change.  Neither Excel 2011 nor Excel 2016 could open the file.

I have tried with and without showing the suffix in the icon.  No difference.

I have tried double-clicking the file's icon, and I have tried opening from within both Excel applications.   The file won't open.

So far all the other Excel files in my computer have opened normally.

Does anyone have any guesses as to what is wrong with this one?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-10-24T22:31:20+00:00

    Try renaming the File (keeping the .xlsx extension).  Don't add any special characters.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-25T12:18:22+00:00

    The file is probably corrupt. Unless you have an older backup that is intact there's not much you can do. You could try opening it in a Windows version of Excel where the file recovery is a little more robust.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-26T21:39:41+00:00

    Hi Richard, sorry you can't get this file open - if the workbook doesn't contain anything confidential or personal to you then I could take a look, LMK and I'll sort out how to get the file with you. Even if we can't recover it I'd like to investigate what might have happened to the content...

    Cheers...pc

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-27T14:20:00+00:00

    Thank you very much for the offer, but this is a confidential file.  Otherwise I would take up your offer in a heartbeat.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-10-27T16:59:40+00:00

    Understand - one thing to try is to rename the file extension to .zip (modern Excel files are compressed containers of XML files) - do you see a set of folders like _rels; customXml; docProps; & xl?

    If you do that lets us know that the basic file itself hasn't been damaged and then we can dig further into the XML files themselves to see if a specific file has been damaged.

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