Excel file won’t open: causes and solutions

The most common reason for this problem: Excel won’t open a file because the file is corrupted. This is especially common if Excel crashes while saving the file, or if a problematic macro prevents the file from being saved correctly. When this happens, the file is often so damaged that you can no longer open it with Excel by double-clicking the file in the File Explorer.

In some cases, the solution is simple:

1. Open a blank document in Excel.
2. Select the File tab and click on “Open” to see a list of recently opened files. Alternatively, you can use the Excel keyboard shortcut Ctrl + O.
3. Double-click the file you want to open.
4. If the file still won’t open, click “Browse” and search for the file.
5. At the bottom of the “Open” dialog box, click the small arrow next to the “Open button”, then choose “Open and Repair” from the context menu.
6. If the files are corrupted, you will be asked whether you want to repair the file or just extract data. First try to repair the file. If that doesn’t work, you can use the “Extract Data” option to recover data from the file or you can try to recover the Excel file.

Excel has two different native file formats. The original XLS format was used until Excel 2003. Since then, Microsoft has used a new XML-based file format with the extension XLSX. The two formats are not directly compatible with each other. When third-party programs save an Excel format file, they sometimes use the wrong extension. In that case, try renaming the extension of the problem file from XLS to XLSX or vice versa. Then try to open the file in Excel again.

If you double-click an Excel file in the File Explorer and a blank worksheet appears instead of the file you selected, do the following:

1. On the File tab, select “Options”.
2. On the next screen, click “Advanced” on the left.
3. Scroll down to the “General” section and disable the option “Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)”.
4. Choose “OK” to confirm and exit Excel.
5. Now restart Excel by double-clicking the Excel file in the File Explorer.

If an Excel file opens in a spreadsheet program other than Excel, or if it opens in an application that cannot display the file, the file association is set incorrectly in Windows.

1. Right-click the Excel file in the File Explorer.
2. In the context menu, select “Open With” and then “Choose another app”. Windows will now show the application that opens Excel files by default.
3. In this dialog box, select “Excel” under “Other options” and select “Always use this app to open XLSX files”.
4. If you click “OK”, Excel will be used to open Excel files in future.