Excel: Corrupt file opened in "Open Office"

I know, another Excel posting... Why you might ask? It's because that's what people outside the IT world use. I know a girl who who works at a bank that did her wedding invitations in Excel, crazy but true.

The past few days we have folks out on vacation and I'm kind of filling in as the all around IT guy (I can design a database with billion row tables, but I sometimes have trouble changing a printer ink cartridge). Sure enough one of the folks here has a rather large Excel file that's not opening. This particular file has been saved in multiple Excel versions, contains pivot tables, has tons of linked cell values, and has been causing trouble for over a week. Today none of the backed up versions are even opening (no clue why a file that was opened but not saved yesterday can not be opened today).

Stumbling around, I found some rumblings of folks being able to open corrupt Excel files using "Open Office". We had nothing to loose so we gave it a try. Sure enough, the file opened up (sans the pivot tables though). The guy even saved the file in Open Office and then was able to reopen it in Excel (not sure if this was a good idea though).

To make a long story short, when in "Corrupt Excel file dire straights land", download "Open Office" and give it a try.

Until next time...Rich