Re: Excel cannot open this file. The file might have been damaged or modified from it's original format.

Hi MVPs,

After my wife spent 7 hours on an Excel file of our home budgets, full of Pivot Tables, last night, the aforementioned file -- now corrupted -- won't open in Excel at all.

At first, I thought this was happening because there are two versions of Excel on our G5 iMac (running Mac OS 10.4.11), and the file was having a hard time picking the most up-to-date version to open it. Solved that issue, but still couldn't open the file.

Tried NeoOffice, but the some of the file's contents vanished. Our old Windows laptop with MS Office, however, did open the file and it's now saved with another name we can read on the iMac.

Question: Is there a utility on the newest version of MS Office for the Mac that can fix previously usable, but now corrupted, Excel files? I'm not convinced that upgrading to a newer version will help in the future.

Thanks for any help and advice y'all can provide,

Wayne

I've had this twice now with the same spreadsheet (quite a large one)
and Excel has now irrevocably lost data for me. I have a version in
backup, but all is lost for what recent data  Excel 2008 has destroyed
in its mangling it seems. Older versions of Excel used to be able to
do data recovery, but I guess this is now impossible?

Before I go back to Office 2004 (which I intend to do), is there any
way to recover the data?

Oh ... and how does consumer law work in the US (where I bought the
software)? It's obviously not fit for purpose as UK consumer law would
understand it, but do I stand a chance of a refund?

Cheers,

Jon