Can't open XP Excel file

[Linda]

I have Windows 2000. I sent an Office 2000 Excel file to
someone who updated it (he uses XP) and he sent it back to
me. It comes back to me as winmail.dat and opens in
notepad. I cannot open the file as excel. Anyone know
what the problem is and how to fix it?
Thanks

[Dave Peterson]

This sounds more like a email problem than excel, but ...

If you save the winmail.dat to your harddrive, then rename it to test.xls, can
you open it correctly then?

If yes, woohoo!

If it opens and it looks like a bunch of numbers (about 80 columns across) that
go on forever, you file may still be uuencoded (a way to encrypt (not for
security) files so that they could get sent in email).

If that's the case, maybe you could change winmail.dat to winmail.UUE. If you
have winzip (or other un-encoder) on your pc, it might let you open the .uue
file. From there, you could save the .xls file that's inside it.

If that works, woohoo!

If neither of these works, I'd ask for another copy.

(If you post back, you may want to mention what email program you're using. It
might get a better (couldn't be worse) response!)

--

Dave Peterson
ec3...@msn.com

[Gord Dibben]

Ask the sender to change to "plain text" before sending. RTF will screw up an
Excel file.

HTH Gord Dibben Excel MVP - XL97 SR2

[Dave Peterson]

A coincidence--I was looking for something on our internal web at work
and there was a question about the same problem.

The answer pointed to http://www.fentun.com/

I didn't use it, but it might be a nice work-around for the OP's
problem.

Gord Dibben <gdi...@shaw.ca> wrote in message news:<u1trquc0ivspntgma...@4ax.com>...