Error Message – “*.xls cannot be accessed”

At times when you try to open an existing Excel spreadsheet, you may get an error message showing:

“*.xls cannot be accessed.” The file may be read-only, or you may be trying to access a read-only location. Or, the server the document is stored on may not be responding.
Here *.xls is the identity of the file to which you are trying to open.

This error message may arise in case when any of the following situations are true:
• The particular file is corrupted
• The file is saved on a network volume of Novell operating system

If any of these situations come true, the file may become inaccessible and can lead to data loss.

If you are facing this problem on stand alone system, then you can resolve it by following these steps:
1. open the damaged spreadsheet
2. copy the contents of the spreadsheet to another excel spreadsheet
3. save the file to different locations with different names

In case when the difficulty is occurred on Novell network, you need to get the technical support from Novell to resolve this subject as its totally different operating system and common users can’t use the tools of this operating system.

In any of these technique doesn’t work, it may origin the serious trouble of data loss. In these circumstances, you need to fix your corrupted Excel spreadsheet in order to make it accessible. You can perform this task using third party software to repair excel known as Excel Recovery software.

Excel repair software is specifically planned data recovery tools for repairing and restoring the corrupted Excel spreadsheet. These data recovery software recover the Excel sheet in its original layout as it was before corruption. This software improves all the contents of the sheet.

Determination Excel Crashing when calculated field is included to PivotTable

PivotTable is a tool used in MS Excel to sum up the data and to symbolize in a appropriate manner by creating another table with the summarized consequences. Other functions of it include sorting out, counting or totaling the data stored in a table or spreadsheet. PivotTables are often used to extract statistical information from raw data.

Calculated fields are supplementary fields to your pivot table which are actually existing fields containing functions. But sometimes, when you try to add a intended field to the pivot table in your Excel sheets, you may encounter the following error message:

“This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.”

When further you click on its details part another error message gets displayed:

“EXCEL caused an invalid page fault in module EXCEL.EXE at 015f:300fbe4a.”

These are error messages are created in Windows 95 and98. But in Windows 2000 the same situation may generate the following error message:

“Excel has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program.”

After these error messages the Excel quits unpredictably.

The reason for the above error messages could be any like if you try to put in calculated field into a PivotTable report or the basis of the PivotTable report contains 5,117 records or the data in the PivotTable is damage and need to repair excel file.

You need to use third party excel repair software to work on this problem. These excel repair software utilizes the most influential algorithms to extract the data as much as possible by carrying out a complete scan of the damaged Excel spreadsheets.

The data in the PivotTables can easily be restored along with the formulas which had been actually applied.

SYLK Format to Repair Excel Workbooks

MS Excel workbook can get corrupted due to various reasons as unexpected shutdown, virus attack, application faults and more. One of the methods to repair damaged workbooks is to save them in different format. It filters the corrupted file and gives you an error-free file. Since it causes data loss and above all, this method is not feasible in all cases of Excel file corruption, you can alternatively use Excel Repair tools that offer safe file repair.

Microsoft provides a file format called SYLK (Symbolic Link) to exchange data between applications like MS Excel. SYLK files are saved with .slk extension. You can export a spreadsheet data, created with Excel 2003 or Excel 2002 Standard Edition, in SYLK format and get the damaged file repaired. Such files can only contain displayable ANSI characters, which force few restrictions to the file:

• If the Excel file is Unicode formatted, a SYLK file will still be encoded in ANSI code page.
• Characters displayable in Unicode will be converted to a question mark .

However, you can repair the damaged Excel workbook by filtering with SYLK format. To do so, make sure that you can open the damaged file in Excel:

• Open the corrupt Excel file and click File->Save As
• Then click SYLK (Symbolic Link) in the Save as type list and click to Save
• Next, you receive a message informing that you have selected a file that doesn’t support workbooks containing multiple sheets. Click OK in this message
• After this, you receive another message informing that the Excel file contains several features, which are unsupportive with SYLK format. Click Yes in this message
• First click Close and then Open on File menu
• Select the SYLK file created and Click Open
• Click Save As on File menu and save it as MS Excel Workbook
  

If the above steps fail to repair your corrupted Excel workbook, use of Excel Recovery tools that can bring you the effective results. Excel Repair software are powerful utilities designed to scan a corrupted Excel file and restore it safely.

Excel Corruption Due to Fatal Errors

When you attempt to open a MS Excel 2003 workbook, which was saved in XML format, the application might stop responding and you may encounter the below given error message:

“MS Excel has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Please tell Microsoft about this problem.
We have created an error report that you can send to help us improve Microsoft Excel. We will treat this report as confidential and anonymous.
To see what this error report contains, click here. ”

After this error message, you will not be able to access data from the particular Excel spreadsheet.

Such sorts of error messages appeared in Excel 2003 when there is a fatal error. Anytime when you come across this error dialog box, it means Excel is having fatal error. You might select to report error you can get more details on error by clicking detail link.

It will show you the error signature, a list of some details about the error. Though, it looks like cryptic to most of the users, but the error signature has detailed information about the error. The signature of this error message shows that the excel.exe file has got damaged. It is the executable file of MS Excel. It could also be the result of problematic Mso.dll file.

No matter what the cause of this problem is, the ultimate result would be inaccessible and damaged Excel file and data loss.

At this time, you should think of Excel recovery. Excel recovery can be done using third party tools, know as Excel repair software. Using Excel recovery software, you can repair and restore all of your Excel spreadsheet objects like charts, macros, hyperlinks and so forth.

Selected Workbook Cannot be Opened

MS Excel is a spreadsheet application with advanced functionality and features. You can include graphs, pivot tables, charts, formulas etc. MS Excel is used in different fields like accounting, report generation and more. From MS Excel 97 to Excel 2003, the spreadsheets are saved in the .xls format but MS Excel 2007 uses another XML format which is named as .xlsx. Sometime you may face issues related to file corruption while opening spreadsheets. MS Excel provides automatic recovery mode to solve minor corruption problems with Excel files. If you reopen the affected file, it will try to repair and restore it. But, in case of potential spreadsheet damage, you need to scan your file with efficient excel repair tools.

Consider a scenario, suppose you try to publish a workbook to MS SharePoint Web Part report page and it gives the following error:

"The workbook that you selected cannot be opened. The workbook may be in an unsupported file format, or it may be corrupt. Would you like to try and open this file in Excel?"

The error is specific to Excel 2007. As an additional symptom, when you try to open this workbook, you face unreadable content error. This error occurs due to one of these reasons:

. The file contains PivotTable that uses KPI and one or more of them have an expression in Current Time Member property. MS Excel workbook is damaged or corrupt

To solve the issue, you need to follow these steps:

. Try removing expressions from Current Time Member properties . Repair damaged Excel file:

. Open the file with 'Open and Repair' feature . Try to link the file from a new workbook . Open the file in MS Word, Word Pad or MS Excel Viewer . If a chart is linked to the file, use a macro that can extract data . Use commercial excel recovery solutions to scan and repair your damaged Excel file. XLS repair software are special tools to scan and repair your damaged Excel files. You can use these software in almost all cases of Excel spreadsheet corruption.