The other day Excel was refusing to open a spreadsheet and the built in open and repair feature failing to help in anyway what so ever.

I started to research other methods that I could use to at least recover some of the information from it!

I was pleased to discover that the spreadsheet program included in Open Office called Calc works surprisingly well with speadsheets which were created in Excel.

I thought it was worth a shot, Calc opened the spreadsheet fine compared to Excel which seemed to crash each time.

After opening the spreadsheet you can save it as a spreadsheet for older versions of Excel such as 2000 or 2003.You can do this by clicking “File” on the menu bar, then click “Save As…”. Now a pop up will appear, asking you where you would like to save it and what type of file you would like to save it as.

From the drop down menu you will be able to save the spreadsheet as an Excel file.

The new spreadsheet that you just saved should now open just fine – The best part about this method is that OpenOffice is a free software package for anyone to download.

You can download OpenOffice from here!