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I've been using an old version of Office 97 (with Macros disabled for security) for some time. Recently I got a new Windows 10 v1803 PC and re-installed Office 97. With the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack installed, Word opens every .docx file I've tried...but Excel always fails to open .xlsx files with this message:
I have tried:
- Opening file in Google Sheets and exporting as a fresh
.xlsxfile - Installed SP1, SP2 & SP3 for
Office 2007 Compatibility Pack - Renamed the extension from
.xlsxto.xls(why this is supposed to work beats me, but I found this suggestion in an online search)
Always the same result of "Not recognised". This worked on my earlier Windows 8.1 machine. Any ideas?
UPDATE
Based on one of the comments, I upgraded my installation from Office 97 SR-1 to SR-2. However, the result is the same: Word opens .docx files but Excel is not able to open .xlsx files. The Compatibility mode for Excel has also been switched between Off and various Windows XP modes without helping.
AlainD
Posted 2018-11-15T15:41:00.620
Reputation: 3 150
Does the file name contain any reserved characters? Does the file have 2 extensions (have you turned on show extensions)? – spikey_richie – 2018-11-15T15:46:33.293
Ideas: Install a current MS Office version; install the free WPS. – None – 2018-11-15T15:46:36.993
Have you set Office 97 programs to run in Compatibility Mode? What if you run Excel.exe in compatibility mode (assuming Office 2007 compatibility pack is installed) and try to open the file from File - Open Menu? – patkim – 2018-11-15T16:11:23.093
note that a xlsx is a zip file of many xml files. rename it to .zip, and look at the details. my guess is that there is a feature used that the converter doesn't understand, or you don't have zip installed? – Aganju – 2018-11-15T16:12:08.237
1While you check out the file as @Aganju suggests, you may as well look at the version of Excel the XLSX was saved in (in
\docProps\app.xml. It might be that the compatibility pack can't handle files saved with more recent version Excel than 2007. – cybernetic.nomad – 2018-11-15T16:24:30.603@Aganju: Didn't know about
.xlsxactually being a ZIP! I use 7-zip, does that matter? I extracted everything and the version of Excel my.xlsxwas created with is14.0300. – AlainD – 2018-11-15T17:07:21.827@spikey_richie: Yes, file extensions are turned on. Why does Microsoft even have this silly feature of hiding the extension anyway? – AlainD – 2018-11-15T17:12:09.987
@AlainD , if you can extract the content of the zip, excel can too, so you are good with that zip version. In other words, that is not your issue. – Aganju – 2018-11-15T19:48:02.723
@Aganju: OK, thanks. I suspect its got to do with the fact that I need to upgrade to Office 97 SR-2 (have SR-1 installed) based on the answer from
harrymc...busy looking into this. – AlainD – 2018-11-16T11:54:10.770The file format is only part of the change since 97. There have been a lot of features and functions added since then. You can translate the file format to something that Excel 97 recognizes, but that won't tell Excel 97 what to do with functions and features that aren't in its repertoire. If it could, users would have no reason to upgrade. – fixer1234 – 2018-11-17T07:44:47.203