problem with excel 2007 opening excel 2003 created spreadsheet

[bobby lee]

excel 2007 cannot open a excel 2003 created spreadsheet with macros,
conditional formatting and pivot tables. It strips out the pivot tables
after several repair messages

 

[LDeahl]

I have the same problem with an Excel 2000 file. 2007 says it found
unreadable content and offers to recover the workbook contents if you trust
the source to open the workbook. It follows up with a meaningless xml based
errorlog saying repairs were made. However, the dialog box also says Excel
was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content.
Looks like removing it was the only option...

There's dozens of instances of this error in newsgroups and a few articles
from MS based on Office 2002 and Office XP. None of the recommended actions
worked to resolve this in 2007.

 

[LDeahl]

bobby lee,

I found a way to get more information on the pivot table error in Execl
2000. If you open the workbook in 2000 and then goto Tools, Macros,
Microsoft Script Editor, it opens the code used to format the workbook and
any custom code you may have added. Edit any one of the code pieces just the
make the document "dirty" (add a space and then back it out...). When you
save this now, Excel will compile/syntax check the code on all sheets and
display any errors. Like Excel 2007 does, 2000 says it found unreadable
content and just removes the pivot table. However, the error log was more
specific and narrowed troubleshooting down to a specific field.

The compile/syntax check happens in 2007 Excel but 2007 appears to do it
when the file is opened and the error log was not as descriptive.

Incidentally, the root cause of the error was a column header's field name
that was used in two places: once in the source sheet used to populate the
pivot table and once as a calculated field in the pivot table. Excel didn't
seem to know how to reference the field for both purposes.