Excel – How to open .xls file with Excel 2016

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I have bunch of .Xls file. But we have upgraded to Excel 2016 recently. How can I open .xls file with Excel 2016? It gives me an error message "Excel cannot open the file .xls because the file format or file extension is not valid"

I tried the following few things: But it still doesn't work.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

go to file tab–>options–>Trust center–>Trust center Settings–>Protected View–>under this tab uncheck all the boxes

or this…

file tab–>options–>Trust center–>Trust center Settings–>File Block Settings–>under this tab uncheck all the boxes

Best Answer

Unfortunately, none of the above worked for me. I'm on Win 10 with Excel 2016 (32-bit). The only thing that worked for me was to open the workbook using the Excel VBA Editor (ALT+F11). You can type the following at the immediate windows (CTRL+G if it doesn't display initially):

application.Workbooks.Open FileName:="FILENAME.XLS", CorruptLoad:=xlExtractData

Obviously replace FILENAME.XLS with the file name (and optionally path) of the file you are trying to open.

This at least allowed me to view the worksheets and the data. The files I needed to open only contained data. I presume this would not recover any formatting, charts, etc...

Note that an article on SpiceWorks suggests this is due to an update from Microsoft causing the issue. I work in a very tightly controlled environment so was not able to uninstall the update myself.

Hope this helps someone else out.

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