and... unfortunately, harsh though it seems, all beta versions were clear
and unambiguous, do not use this beta for important, mission critical files.

New conditional formatting feature or converter to recover beta files where
people have not heeded that warning? I know my preference and make no
mistake, someone from the dev team has to write this for a week or two, when
the file format, documented in an encyclopedia sized document to comply with
Open Format is changing underneath him/her

Just my £0.02

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
DTHIS
web: www.nickhodge.co.uk
blog: www.nickhodge.co.uk/blog/

FREE UK OFFICE USER GROUP MEETING, MS READING, 27th APRIL 2007
www.officeusergroup.co.uk

"JLatham" <HelpFrom @ Jlathamsite.com.(removethis) wrote in message
...
I've not been having much of what I'd call success with this lately. A
gentleman in Russia sent me a Beta created file (not sure which version)
just
2 days ago and I was unable to do anything with it: "corrupt file"
reported.

You're certainly welcome to attach it to an email and send it to
HelpFrom @ jlathamsite.com (remove spaces)
and I'll give it a shot - but be prepared for unsuccessful results.

Would be nice if my "wish list" item for a converter to at least read all
versions and convert to RTM would come true -- then even if you were in a
situation like this, you could use such a converter to create 2007 format
file, then find anyone with 2007 and ask them to Save As pre-2007
compatible
file so you could recover the data, if not the functionality.

" wrote:

Would any of you be able to help with a similar issue?

I only installed one beta version of Office 2007: the "Beta 2" disk
which shipped with August 2006's PC Pro. So I guess that's pre
technical refresh. When the beta programme finished, we went back to
Office 2003.

I migrated my files, and my eldest son migrated his. Just now, my
youngest comes to me with a file he'd created & we can't open. Same
messages as above. File created in Jan 07, but the software hadn't
been updated since summer 06.

I can open it with Zip & examine the XML files - but he's got quite a
large table of numbers in there, so I'm not keen to go trying to
rebuild it from that!