Hello. Please help me to stop an Excel error message. Every time I try to open the file, I get this error: "The file is unknown".
Has anyone any experience in this and if so could you help point me in the right direction? How to repair Excel file?

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

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[waits for responses to spam bait telling us which crapware is best for repairing Excel files]

Becuase it is my post. I did not find the solution. I was banned for my question!

I want to say thank you for taking the time to share how to go about fixing this.

So it's fixed?

I did not find the solution.

Guess not. Therefore we can assume that if some helpful newbie posts the exact same "solution" that didn't work the last time, you'll immediately post that no one should use that lousy product that doesn't work at all, right?

I can understand the ban. There are so many shills posting that question with a spam reply that moderators just ban or remove such a post today.

It's not like you can't google for repair tools. Find any that are "try before you buy." But given the rather nasty RANSOMWARE apps going around you know to try this only in a disposable PC.

PS. Added with edit. A rather new PC user had the file unknown problem. Turns out they didn't know to install Excel or such. I set them up with NINITE.COM, LibreOffice and they were able to open the spreadsheet. For free no less.

I got a little grouchy and cynical perhaps, OP. I too tend to default towards cynicism on these topics for the reasons RProffitt mentions. Thus, apologies if this is a real question.

But given the rather nasty RANSOMWARE apps going around you know to try this only in a disposable PC.

I'm not sure if you have to go that far. Virtual Machine seems ideal here.

But "The file is unknown" seems like an odd error message. Never seen that one in Excel, which of course doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But I would hope Excel would give you something a little more detailed to work with. Exact error message and circumstances are crucial.

commented: You're right. A Virtual Machine would do nicely. +11

@AssertNull. After so many error messages and doing the moderator thing for years I find that some folk are translating from another language so they might be correct. This means folk shouldn't omit the original untranslated error message.

How to ask a question is an art too.

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