File error. Some number formats may have been lost.
 

I'm in the middle of getting my xl 2002 workbooks to also work under xl
2000. The company we are buying overnighted to me a PC with xl 2000.

One problem I'm getting is on one very large workbook Excel is giving me a
"File error. Some number formats may have been lost." upon startup. I did
some google searching and I find that others have gotten this when mailing
a 2002 workbook to a 2000 user. Some mention the workbook being corrupted.
Unlikely. Then I saw some messages about having too many custom formats. If
this is so, then I can delete the numerous unused ones listed. But nothing
I found gave any definitive answer. Any ideas?

One idea I have is to write a program that extracts all the formats and
puts them into a workbook as strings. Run on each system, then compare
those two workbooks. (The xl 2000 PC was connected to our network.)

Don <www.donwiss.com (e-mail link at home page bottom).

File error. Some number formats may have been lost.
 

On Thu, 11 May 2006 21:05:01 -0400, Don Wiss wrote:

I'm in the middle of getting my xl 2002 workbooks to also work under xl
2000. The company we are buying overnighted to me a PC with xl 2000.

One problem I'm getting is on one very large workbook Excel is giving me a
"File error. Some number formats may have been lost." upon startup. I did
some google searching and I find that others have gotten this when mailing
a 2002 workbook to a 2000 user. Some mention the workbook being corrupted.
Unlikely. Then I saw some messages about having too many custom formats. If
this is so, then I can delete the numerous unused ones listed. But nothing
I found gave any definitive answer. Any ideas?

One idea I have is to write a program that extracts all the formats and
puts them into a workbook as strings. Run on each system, then compare
those two workbooks. (The xl 2000 PC was connected to our network.)

I solved the problem. I used a macro that found all the unique number
formats in the workbook. Then I opened the workbook in xl 2000 and ran the
macro again. I found one format that was slightly different. It was a
date/time format that included seconds. In xl 2002 I then switched to a
date/time in 24 hour time. I still had the same problem. So I picked a
date/time format in xl 2000 and saved it. All is fine now.

I did write a macro that created a mirror workbook with just the format
strings (excluding the General ones). Using that I was able to easily
search for the format that was giving me the problem.

Don <www.donwiss.com (e-mail link at home page bottom).