Office has long had an "Open and Repair" option under File Open. To the
right of the Open button, there's a down-arrow. Click that and select the
last option, "Open and Repair". It's not well-known, but it's been there a
long time. I think I became aware of it around Office 2000, when we had
some issues with old documents previously translated from WordPerfect.
Still there in Office 2010. Word and Excel have it - I presume some other
Office apps have it, but I haven't looked.
Karl
PS - Have you tried just rebooting? OS'es are much more stable nowadays,
but a reboot can still cure some weird little issues.
-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne
Subject: Re: [Shop-talk] OT- Excel help, (before I shoot my computer)!
On 3/14/2012 3:44 PM, eric at megageek.com wrote:
> I have an excel spreadsheet that has to have a date cell in the format
> dd/mm/yy. No problem. I set the language to English "UK" and I can
> select that format.
Tried any alternative software? Like LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org)?
Totally Free: http://www.libreoffice.org/
Or if it's something non-confidential and you don't mind sharing, shoot me a
copy off-list and I might be able to assist.
I don't think you have a file corruption problem. But FWIW, if anyone DOES
run into such a thing - like MS Office just hanging when you try to open a
file, Libre or Open Office are about the best recovery tools around.
Eg: coworker had lots of time invested in 300+ page Word 'Doc. PC crashes.
Afterward, Word hangs when trying to open it again, despite the "auto save"
feature being on. Tried 4 versions of Word, from 2000 -
2007 and the free "MS Word Viewer" -- every one of them does the SAME DANG
THING - hangs while opening it. Because the code is probably identical in
all 5 programs. And MS figures they're infallible, thus the code is written
with NO fault tolerance for a corrupted document.
The open source products mentioned had to reverse engineer Microsoft's
proprietary file format. And knew and admitted they couldn't figure it all
out. So their code is smart enough to "read around" things it doesn't
understand, and when that happens, usually loses some pretty formatting, but
all the text is still intact.
In the above case, OpenOffice.org Writer read the whole .doc file intact,
save for one paragraph of partial text and garbled gibberish, but was happy
to re-save it as a .doc file that Word could then read!
ie: >99.8% of document recovered, that WAS a total loss using MS's own
product. We now just use Libre Office at the company.
-Wayne
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