Mac Forum / Applications / Excel / February 2005

Hello everyone!

I have a nasty problem in my lab since a few months: some Excel files
cannot be opened.

When one double-clicks on one of these files, it opens (Quartz animation),
Excel comes in the foreground and briefly displays an "opening file..."
progress bar. But after that nothing else happens: no window, no error
message, no nothing... This inability to open files or corruption doesn't
affect every Excel documents we have, only some of them with no apparent
reason. The lack of an error message makes this problem awfully hard to
investigate. I have not been able to reproduce this corruption purposedly.
It happened to me once: I opened an Excel worksheet modified some values,
saved and closed it. I re-opened it just after but the file would not open
anymore.

These files are all stored on a Linux server running Netatalk 2.0 (see
http://netatalk.sf.net/) to share volumes with the Macs. I investigated on
the Linux side, the filesystem is clean and even OpenOffice cannot manage
to open these corrupt files. We are using MacOS X 10.3 and MS Office X
(Excel version 10.1.5). I tried to upgrade to Excel 10.1.6 but the problem
still persists.

Why do these files get corrupted?
How can I restore them?
What else can I test?

Thanks for your help and regards,
  Etienne