the day has been saved as I found a copy on my laptop which is working for
me.
I tried various things as you have listed below, the page opened but just
all hashes and I tried saving,renaming it and formatting cells.It will open
in excel but only after stating it is not in a recognisable format and when
it opens all the cells are blank, in properties it does show that there is
info in it with the size of the file.

I am still intrigued as to what is going on and will play around with that
copy
Thanks for the help in trying to solve this.

"Gord Dibben" <gorddibbATshawDOTca wrote in message
...
Does this mean you downloaded and installed OpenOffice and were able to
get the
Excel file open in OpenOffice?

Were you able to save as an Excel file and get it open in Excel?

### in a cell can mean the cell is wide enough to display the number in
the
cell.

Can also mean you have negative times in the cells.

Try re-formatting the cells to General format.


Gord

On Mon, 01 May 2006 20:59:27 GMT, "S S"
wrote:

I tried the download and I am getting row upon row of hashes (#)


"Gord Dibben" <gorddibbATshawDOTca wrote in message
. ..
After the re-format, did you re-install Excel?

From where are trying to open the file?

If directly from disc, you may not have much success.

Try copying to the HDD and then opening.

Depending upon how the file got onto the disc, it could be corrupt.

Some people have had success opening corrupt Excel files by opening with
Open
Office.

A large(65 meg) free download from.................

http://www.openoffice.org/


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Mon, 01 May 2006 18:31:09 GMT, "S S"
wrote:

I lost a spreadsheet when my PC crashed and I had to re format the
hardrive,
fotunately I had a back up of the file on a disc but when I try to open
it
I
get the message "the file is not in a recognisable format" I have only
ever
used excel so at a loss what to try next. I have gone into the
properties
of
the file and it says "Microsoft excel worksheet"

Recovery of this file would save me a few hours work so any help would
be
appreciated.
thanks