You may get it open with the free program OpenOffice which reportedly does
wondrous things with corrupt Excel files.

http://www.openoffice.org, a 60-65 meg download or a CD

Or just open your backup copy of the file..............you do have a backup of
an "important" file, right?


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:28:01 -0700, me wrote:

I use excel 2003 and cannot open an important file. Get a message tht the
file cannot be read. Then I get a message tht the file was so damaged that
repairs were not possible. Is there a way for a novice to recover this file?