excel will not open documents

excel cannot access document may be read only or encrypted

that is the error i am getting on a user's laptop. they have windows XP and office 2003. if i try to uncheck the attributes of encryption it will tell me that access is denied. i was told to copy the documents over to a thumbdrive that had been fromatted as FAT32. that did not work. it would give me an error of access denied if i just tried to copy.

any help or suggestions are appreciated. this is a director's documents and they are very important.

Hello tennesseedad,

Are you trying to copy old files over to a new system? Windows 2002 and up no longer use the FAT32 file system. They use NTFS which is not backward compatible. You could email the files to the new system and then download them. 2003 can then convert the file and save it on the new system.

Sincerely,
Leith Ross

No unfortunatly this system has not been upgraded or anything done to it. it was working fine a week ago and then all of a sudden, the user cannot open any of their old excel files. they can make new files but they can't open the old ones. the user,(of course) said that they hadn't done anything to their laptop or changed anything. i still haven't found an answer to open the old files.

i tried to email one of the excel files to myself on my PC to try and open it. when i tried to open the file, it opened right up, but there was no data whatsoever in the excel file.

Hello tennessedad,

Here are some links to recovering damaged or corrupted Excel files.

How to recover data from damaged workbooks in Excel 2002 and 2003
How to handle corrupt Excel workbooks by saving them in the SLYK format in Excel 2003 or Excel 2002

Sincerely,
Leith Ross