Excel – Why does Office 2010 fail to open an Excel file

I would check in event viewer for any issues. If you are using windows 7 you can just type event viewer at the start bar and it will come up.

Post the outcome or issues as a comment.

After Google-ing I discovered the following steps at http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/excslcreate/thread/93af59c1-946c-4f5f-83c1-bd6f58dbd94f. Note that this is for opening files. I currently believe that that is what the issue is.

Try the following steps:

1. Open Excel 2010.
2. Click on File > Options.
3. Select Trust Center > Trust center settings.
4. Select Protected view.
5. Uncheck all the options under Protected View > OK.
6. Restart Excel 2010 and try to open Excel documents.

I researched some more after after I found the previous quote. But all I could find is people trying to open XML pages that they screwed up. Are you doing anything like that, or is this just when you try to open Excel?

Good Luck-

This is a known error in Excel 2010 compatibility checker.

It happens when you try to save the sheet in xls format and you have data validation formulas on a sheet that is not the active sheet when you perform the save.

The error is incorrect and there is no loss of functionality. Refer to Microsoft knowledge base article 2757267.

To verify this, start a new workbook in 2010. On sheet1, enter a data validation list in a single cell referring to a few adjacent cells. (thus it does not break the rules of referring to cells in another sheet).

Do save as and select xls as file format. No error message is produced. Move to sheet 2. Do save as and select xls as the file format. Error message is produced with nothing in the worksheet but a single data validation list.