Excel 97 may be giving you its best guess of the error. It may actually not
be that it cannot find the file, but that it does not recognize it as a real
Excel 97 type of file.

Go back to the system with Office 2K on it and open one of the Excel files
and use Save As to save it as an Excel 97 compatible file. Then take that
back to the system with Excel 97 on it and try opening it again. Also, I
presume you actually have the file on a floppy drive (as A: is normally a
3.5" floppy drive).

Newer versions of Office applications "know" about older versions and can
normally either open them right away or at least offer an opportunity to
convert or otherwise deal with them. But older versions of such applications
obviously have no way of knowing about the format of files made with later
versions unless just luckily the format didn't change between versions.
Access is almost notorious for being incompatible from version to version.
Excel hasn't been as bad, but there are file format incompatabilities between
some versions.

"totoro" wrote:

I have numerous Excel files created on a Win2K Pro system with Office 2K,
and I am trying to copy them to another Win2K machine with Office 97 sr2.
When I try to open the files on the second machine I get this message:

Windows cannot find 'A:\filename.xls'. Make sure you typed the name
correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button,
and then click Search.

and excel files will not open. other file formats are not affected. I can
otherwise manipulate the files (copy, delete etc.)
It doesn't matter if its an e-mail attachment or on disk the error is the
same. it doesn't matter if I doubleclick the file or open it from the file
menu, the error is the same. Any thoughts?