unable to open, next steps?

[Jasonic]

I have an .xlsm which was edited and saved yesterday without incident but will not open today. How can this be?! Sure I did enter a lot of new data and added a lot of table loopkups yesterday, but it was open and calculating fine when I saved it; no crashes or errors at all.

The first message that comes up is:

Excel cannot complete this task with available resources. Choose less data or close other applications.

I then attempted to open first thing after a restart and no other user apps running. The machine is a quad core 2 with 3 GB ram and winXP 32. Same error.

During the attempts to open the workbook, memory steadily rises up to just over 2 GB when the error dialogue comes up.

Clicking past this error, the next dialogue that comes up is: Excel found unreadable content in '(NameOmmitted).xlsm'. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.

The attempts to recover from this point also fail and Excel gives up after the 2nd try; each attempt the first error about resources comes up.

I then chose a manual open and repair then attempted to extract my data. Choosing either recover formulas and convert to values also both fail to open the book at around the 2.25 GB mark. The message at this point is: The workbook cannot be opened or repaired by Microsoft Excel because it is corrupt. Really? How could this happen if it was working when I saved it?

So, given this situation, I have a couple of questions:

Would opening this workbook on a 64bit system with more RAM possibly work?

Is there any other application or method to look inside this workbook and copy formulas and values from cells?

Thanks in advance for any help.
-jason

[Jasonic]

Followup: Attempts to open with Excel Mac 2008 also fail right at the end and memory usage is in the 3GB range.

Whatever I did with those lookups sure seems to have tanked the file from ever re-opening.

I am working past this problem from a backup file and will have to be more careful with lookup. Perhaps if I use VLookup instead.

thanks for reading this.
-jason

[shg]

Thanks for posting your solution.

Relevant or not, LOOKUP is provide for compatibility with other spreadsheet programs, and is deprecated in Excel in favor of HLOOKUP or VLOOKUP.