A long time ago, one of my co-workers opened a .xls file in MSWord and saved it
as an MSWord file with a .xls extension.

He was embarrassed (well, slightly), but we had backups (and that's a good
thing!).

==========
To the original poster...

Sometimes, different versions of excel (not sure about MSWord) can open files
that others can't. You may want to try that.

And sometimes, the same version on different pcs will work ok -- it may not be
the file as much as the application that's corrupted.

Good luck.

Bruce Sinclair wrote:

In article , wrote:
If you can trust the subject and the body, then judging by the extensions (.doc
and .xls), the OP may not be using Office 2007.

Ah ... well spotted that man. :)

But that doesn't mean that OO would work in any case.

Quite true. Depending on the value of the now corrupt file, it can be worth
trying though. :)

I wonder though ... I have seen word (for example) try to open an XL file
someone had accidentally renamed (from .doc to .xls :) ).
MS Office is very trusting of its extensions IIRC (ie it uses what it's
been told to use to open things). Not sure about the windows versions of OO,
but linux doesn't particularly care about extensions, and seems to look in
the file to see what it is before opening it unless specifically told what
to use. If the windows versions of OO do that too, that apparent
"corruption" would also be covered. :)
To the OP ... the files haven't been renamed recently have they ?

Bruce Sinclair wrote:

In article ,
wrote:
Some people have said that they can open corrupted workbooks in
OpenOffice.org.

http://openoffice.org
is where you''d go to download the free office suite.

That used to be one of the recommended possibilities. I have to say that I
know one case where opening a corrupted word 2007 in OO didn't work ... but
we think that was largely due to endnote not playing well with others. :)
And of course, you might lose/change some formatting.

jonty wrote:

How can corrupted .xls & .doc file be recovered to Excel and Word
applications?



--

Dave Peterson