Recovering Excel Spreadsheets

Ever had an Excel Spreadsheet suddenly refuse to load? Got the error message on the right? I had that today, and after quite a bit of research I managed to recover a file.

After reading page after page about how to recover formulas and data by referring obliquely to them in formulas, I saw a comment that often, opening the spreadsheet in a later version would do the trick, or failling that OpenOffice.org would work.

I put the spreadsheet on a floppy and brought it home. Excel 2000 at home was no good. Finally I transferred the file to my main Linux workstation and Voila! It opened straight away with OpenOffice.org, a free office software suite. There is a version of this for Windows too, so you don't have to have a Linux box to rescue your files.