Excel 97 files should open quite happily in Excel 2003. It might be
interesting to see whether Open Office will open the file and save it in a
more recent version.
--
David Biddulph

"oldbbplayer" wrote in message
...
I have a file that I need to open that was created in Excel 97 or an
earlier
version. When I try to open the file with Excel 2003, I get a message
that
the file is in an "unrecognizable format." Is there any need for special
software to open such files? Unfortunately I do not have any old versions
of
Excel to try. Thanks, Fred.