Excel v.X and Excel98 problem and workaround

Sep 07, '02 11:58:49AM

Contributed by: shacker

If you create a spreadsheet in Excel v.X, it will work fine with pretty much any version of Office under Windows. But oddly enough, Office 98 under OS 9 will complain "Not enough memory" and refuse to open the file. This is true regardless of how much memory you allocate to Office 98 and what Excel format you save as from Office X (although really simple formats like CSV do work).

The only solution I've found to this is to open the file on a Windows machine and resave it. The version/format is not important - it just has to be opened and resaved from a Windows box - then it will open properly under Office 98 for OS 9.

Other suggestions that don't involve going through Windows are very welcome.

[Editor's note: I haven't booted in OS 9 since early in 2001 so I can't easily test this hint myself (anyone else?). However, running Excel98 in Classic under 10.2, I had no problems opening any Excel v.X spreadsheets that I tested.]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020907085849432