I put several days into writing a bunch of macros to keep track of my
baseball card inventory. As I was saving, Excel (2000) crashed. The
file was in 97 format. I can open it at home with 97, and it "knows"
there are macros there, but if I try to access them, Excel crashes.
At work in Excel 2000, the file won't even open. I believe the first
spreadsheet tab is the problem, as it acted weird before the crash
(hence why I started to save it).

My problem seems specific, but I can see a general application: what I
need is a macro that will go into a file and read any (hopefully all)
macros in a file and then make the code accessible to copy somewhere
else. Where I can see this as helpful would be if someone wanted a
code to examine a file before opening it with macros.

Is this possible?

(BTW, I did try two on-line recovery services, as well as some trial
software, and none of them could pull the macros out).

You're in a world of hurt and I sympathize. One thought is to try and
save as from XL97 then try opening with both versions. Likely better
advice is to buy a gun :(

Good job trying the recovery services. You might try now to get your
hands on XL2002 somewhere. 2002("version XP") seems to be able to
handle corruption better than other versions, and I have succeeded with
it opening files unaccessible by XL2000. Microsoft's solution to the
oft-corrupting 2000 was not to fix 2000, but sell you 2002. The
Antichrist ain't the world's richest man by accident :)