Accessing a Problem Shared Workbook

Kim has an Excel workbook that she later set up as a shared workbook. The workbook worked just fine for a while, then all of a sudden users get the error message "Excel.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows" when they try to open the workbook. Kim is wondering how she can get the workbook open.

Unfortunately, Kim, it sounds like the workbook has become corrupted in some way. This doesn't always happen with shared workbooks, but there have been reports that corruption is more likely in such workbooks than in non-shared workbooks.

When a workbook is corrupted, your options are very limited. In a perfect world, you could simply ignore the corrupted one and use your backup copy of the workbook, instead. If you don't have a backup (meaning, you don't live in a perfect world), then you may need to resort to more drastic measures. The following link, at the Microsoft Knowledge Base, can help you if you are using Excel 97:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=142117

If you are using Excel 2000, use this page instead:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=179871

For users of Excel 2002 and Excel 2003, use this page:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=820741

There is no information at the Knowledge Base as to how to get information from a corrupted Excel 2007 file, but that may be coming in the near future. There are general ideas you can glean from several other Web sites, such as these:

http://www.jkp-ads.com/Articles/CorruptFiles.asp
http://www.fdrlab.com/tips/excel.html