Hi, I'm fairly new to Macs and have installed the MS Office suite for Mac (2008). No arguments with the look and functionality of the packages standalone but when someone sends me an Excel file from an earlier version (2003) I cannot open it my Mac.

Any ideas? Is there a patch/fix that I may be missing?

Thanks

Matt

Since you are new to this, you may want to start here >> Help & How To Excel

Main page here >> Help & How-To Mactopia

Edit: Sorry if I sounded dismissive.

I'm sorry but I've had a look through those links and can't see anything that resembles the problems I'm having with opening MS Office files. It seems that only some PC created Excel files (the majority) do not open on the Mac.

Since the original post I have also had problems with opening PC created MS Word files on the Mac. With this, the attachment just opens a blank new document. The rest of the MS Office programs may have similar issues but I don't tend to use them that often (other than Entourage).

Oh.. Messenger doesn't want to connect on the Mac.

So all in all my MS Office for Mac experience hasn't been great and I'm getting to the point where I'm thinking of simply running XP/Vista on the Mac knowing that everything used to work!

I looked in the compatability section and couldn't see anything similar... it seems to be written from a Windows user's point of view i.e. creating docs so that windows users can view them. I'm having the oposite problem.

@hillbillygeek: Didn't think you were being dismissive and I learned quite a bit from the links you gave me, thanks.

Matt

Office 2008 12.1.1 was released today. Try updating to that and see if it helps

Thanks but I've already updated Office this morning and the problems are still occuring

Do you know if the files can be opened with Office 04, or another Mac with 08? Are all the files originating from the same machine?

Hi, I don't know about Office 2004 and I don't have another Mac or know anyone that uses one unfortunately...

The files are from different senders. Some PDFs won't open either so I'm constantly switching to my PC to view attachements (or print them which is another issue - please see my other post at http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic154348.html if you think you can help)

I don't know but Apple's catchphrase of "It just works.." seems to be missing a big "DOESN'T" in my brief experience of this one!

Thanks

Matt

What version of OS X are you running? It might be an OS issue.

I'm running Leopard OS X 10.5.3 and the MS Office for Mac is 2008 version with the most recent updates installed (this weeks release). I've got both Leopard and Office to update automatically but this problem has occurred since day 1 of getting the Mac back in April '08.

Thanks

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office?

It may sound stupid but with the Excel Program open and in Focus, can you go to file then choose open and browse to the file and try and open it that way.

Failing that for tricky Microsoft documents I have difficulty with I open them in Neo Office (A Mac version of Open Office) and usually re-save them. IMHO Neo Office could open Fort Knox and get useful information from it.

www.neooffice.org/

Thanks for your reply G Bomb but I think the problem is solved. Being used to Outlook it turns out that that Entourage has a couple of major differences for opening mails from Gmail and other IMAP accounts. There is an option to download entire message and if you don't click it or don't see it (or both in my case) then it will just ping at you or try to open a partially downloaded attachment.

So after clicking on download entire message the problem exists no more!

Thanks for everyone help and sorry to waste your time, however I still have an open case for my printing problems with the Mac so if anyone can help with that I would appreciate it greatly... I don't think that I've made a numpty error with that one!!!

Cheers

Matt