File error. Some number formats may have been lost.

[Don Wiss]

I'm in the middle of getting my xl 2002 workbooks to also work under xl
2000. The company we are buying overnighted to me a PC with xl 2000.

One problem I'm getting is on one very large workbook Excel is giving me a
"File error. Some number formats may have been lost." upon startup. I did
some google searching and I find that others have gotten this when mailing
a 2002 workbook to a 2000 user. Some mention the workbook being corrupted.
Unlikely. Then I saw some messages about having too many custom formats. If
this is so, then I can delete the numerous unused ones listed. But nothing
I found gave any definitive answer. Any ideas?

One idea I have is to write a program that extracts all the formats and
puts them into a workbook as strings. Run on each system, then compare
those two workbooks. (The xl 2000 PC was connected to our network.)

Don <www.donwiss.com> (e-mail link at home page bottom).

[Don Wiss]

On Thu, 11 May 2006 21:05:01 -0400, Don Wiss wrote:

>I'm in the middle of getting my xl 2002 workbooks to also work under xl
>2000. The company we are buying overnighted to me a PC with xl 2000.
>
>One problem I'm getting is on one very large workbook Excel is giving me a
>"File error. Some number formats may have been lost." upon startup. I did
>some google searching and I find that others have gotten this when mailing
>a 2002 workbook to a 2000 user. Some mention the workbook being corrupted.
>Unlikely. Then I saw some messages about having too many custom formats. If
>this is so, then I can delete the numerous unused ones listed. But nothing
>I found gave any definitive answer. Any ideas?
>
>One idea I have is to write a program that extracts all the formats and
>puts them into a workbook as strings. Run on each system, then compare
>those two workbooks. (The xl 2000 PC was connected to our network.)

I solved the problem. I used a macro that found all the unique number
formats in the workbook. Then I opened the workbook in xl 2000 and ran the
macro again. I found one format that was slightly different. It was a
date/time format that included seconds. In xl 2002 I then switched to a
date/time in 24 hour time. I still had the same problem. So I picked a
date/time format in xl 2000 and saved it. All is fine now.

I did write a macro that created a mirror workbook with just the format
strings (excluding the General ones). Using that I was able to easily
search for the format that was giving me the problem.

Don <www.donwiss.com> (e-mail link at home page bottom).