How to Fix the “Excel Cannot Open the File” Error

Over the years, Excel has become the world’s leading spreadsheet. Many people and organizations prefer working with it due to its simplicity and ability to include functions and formulas. This article focuses on how to solve the ‘Excel cannot open the file’ error.

John had been working on a workbook in Excel for his employer for two weeks. One morning, he double clicked the file to open it and an error message appeared that Excel could not open the file or the file was invalid. What could have gone wrong?

This is a common problem and could have been caused by one of two things:

1. Excel file corruption.
2. Errors in Excel.

If it was due to an error in Excel, a blank white screen might appear when you try to open the file instead of displaying an error message. This has been reported to happen when you try to open XLA/HTML files with Excel using the .xls extension.

To work around some of the errors (both inbuilt and accidental modifications) in Excel that may be causing the error, you should try the following steps:

Change the Ignore DDE option

To do this:

1. Open Excel.
2. Click onFile(In a new workbook)
3. Selectoptions.
4. OnAdvanced, go to theGeneraltab.
5. Uncheck the box toIgnore applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange.
6. ClickOk.

Disable add-ins

Wrongly installed or created add-ins could also be the reason behind the “Excel cannot open the file” error. Both Excel add-ins and COM add-ins have been reported to interfere with Excel’s operations. To identify a problematic add-in, you need to turn them off, one after another until you narrow it down to one.

1. Start Excel.
2. Click onfile.
3. SelectOptions.
4. Click onadd-ins.
5. Select theManage下拉菜单(在屏幕的底部)。
6. Select COMAdd-ins.
7. Click onGo.
8. Select one of the add-ins on the list and remove it. You should begin with the most recent add-in.
9. Try to open the file.

If the file does not open, repeat the process with each of the remaining add-ins until you isolate the source of the error.

Repairing Office

Sometimes the problem is beyond Excel and is on the whole Office software. To try and repair Office, use the following steps:

1. Open control panel.
2. Click onprogramsthen selectuninstall programs.
3. Browse and click onMicrosoft Officein the list of programs.
4. Clickchange.
5. SelectOnline repair, thenrepair.
6. Reboot the system.

Resetting file associations

Another way to fix the error is by resetting Excel’s file associations.

1. Opencontrol panel.
2. Click onprograms.
3. Selectdefault programs.
4. Click onSet your default programs.
5. A list of programs appears, selectExcel.
6. Click onChoose default for this program.
7. A list of Excel’s program associations will pop up,select all.
8. Clicksave, thenOK.

Repair the Excel file

If the methods above have not helped you open the file, it simply means that the file is corrupt or damaged. This is no cause for alarm however. With DataNumen Excel Repair, you can repair your Excel file and open it.