"Norman Jones" wrote...
MS Works is not Excel.

You will need to purchase Excel or MS Office unless you merely need to read
the spreadsheet, in which case you can download a free MS viewer from:
....

Depending on the complexity of the OP's workbooks and the speed of his/her
Internet connection, OP could try using the free OpenOffice,

http://www.openoffice.org

There are several other freeware and shareware spreadsheet programs that can
work with .XLS files, though few handle array formulas or external
references. Gnumeric 1.4 does, but it's in beta on Windows.