"File Format is not Valid"

[beammie]

Office 97 - loaded locally on staff's computer but Excel Files are saved to our server (Windows 2000).

A few people have come across this problem and I was hoping someone has had this problem before or knows how to save the files...

This is happening to existing Excel files. When the user goes back into Excel to open an Excel file to modify the file an error comes up - Microsoft Excel (Big Red X) "name of the file.xls File Format is Not Valid" and they are not able to open the file.

Renaming the file, trying to open it in Word, etc... doesn't work either. It's like it looses that it is an Excel spreadsheet?! This is not happening to everyone, a few users very sporadic. A couple of these users are power users so I know they are not changing the format when saving.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I don't know what could be causing this - happends only in Excel, not Word or PPT.

Thank you so much for any ideas!

 

[guava65]

This sounds like a format change. Office97 is pretty old. try creating/saving a file in office 97 closing it then reopening it (before anyone else has a chance to open the file). If you can reopen the file with no problem it is very likely that someone is accessing the file with a newer version of Excel and saving the file after they have made changes. Since there is a definate difference in how the VBA files are incorporated into "97" as opposed to "xp" or "02" versions this alone would cause the error.

Another test is to see if the files can open with a newer version.

good luck

Aloha,
cg

 

[beammie]

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately, opening it in Excel 2000 or XP we got the same message. Could this be a virus someone has heard of?

We are all on Office 97 here and the files are being created here and updated here. The last file that did this was created here (HQ) in Excel 97 a month ago, updated 2 weeks ago, then when she tried opening it last week to modify it again she got the error "File Format Invalid." The file name has the little green X next to it in the directory.? Looks like all the others.

Too weird! This isn't happening to everyone or every file. Just random users and random files.

Thank you so much for your help cg....

If anyone has another thing I can try or look at I would greatly appreciate any help.