subject: How to fix 'Workbook that you selected cannot be opened' error [print this page] Excel services work with Excel 2007 and allows you to share, load, calculate Excel workbooks on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 portals and dashboards. You can share an entire Workbook or just few parts of it like charts, tables etc. By using a Web browser, end users can view and interact with the workbooks. However, at times, when you publish a workbook to Excel Services and try to load it in a browser, you might run into an error message. Such situations erupt when you try to load a corrupt workbook. You can use a healthy backup copy of the Excel file and upload it again to the server. However, if you cannot access a backup copy or if it is not an updated one, then you must consider using an Excel repair software.
Consider a scenario, wherein, you have created an Excel 2007 spreadsheet containing information about the sales revenue of your company. You have an online meeting with your colleagues where you have to discuss the figures and stats given in the Excel sheet. You save the file in .xlsx format and publish it to Excel Services. When you use a Web browser to load the particular Excel workbook, Excel Services doesn't load it. Additionally, you receive the following error message:
"Unable to Load Workbook
The workbook that you selected cannot be opened.
The workbook may be in an unsupported file format, or it may be corrupt.
Would you like to try and open this file in Excel?"
Cause
The error message can be received in the following situations:
If the workbook contains a formula which has a space character in front of the (^) caret operator.
Or if the workbook in question is corrupt or damaged
Resolution
The following Repair excel file steps must be considered to resolve the problem:
You must do away with the space character which is placed in front of the caret operator in the formula
You can also save the affected workbook in non-XML binary format (.xlsb) and then try to republish it to Excel Services
If the problem doesn't get resolved, then it is for sure that the workbook is corrupt. You must employ a third-party Excel repair application and fix the errors in an easy way.
How to fix 'Workbook that you selected cannot be opened' error
