Yes, that’s what I meant when I mentioned I opened the file in OpenXML – I was opening the original ‘bad’ file. OpenXML complained about the Zip data structures, though the error was related to Zip data – I think. Ah, something along the lines of:
“cannot open file zip archive contains unsupported data structures”
Hmmmm…interesting – I thought I had tried this already, but I just did it again: I manually unzipped and then rezipped the file and then tried to open that XLSX file (after renaming the extension). That DID open fine in MS OpenXML SDK Productivity Tools.
The original (bad) file was created on OS X, and I did further testing with files that I created myself (but again on OS X). Oddly, one of my co-workers is able to open the same file on his OS X machine without any errors. I’ll try out a file created on Windows, though. (This system that I’m dealing with uses a plugin to zip up the final files; I’m not sure if the plugin uses it’s own binary for zipping, or the one installed on the current OS.
I did some further testing on the OS X machine I have; I created an XLSX from the OS X side
– Errored out in Excel (OSX)
– Errored out in Excel (Windows)
– Errored out in OpenXML SDK (Windows)
I then extracted and recompressed the file on OS X, without changing the contents:
– Errored out in Excel (OSX)
– Errored out in Excel (Windows)
– Opened OK in OpenXML SDK
And then I created the same XLSX file on the Windows machine:
– Opened OK in Excel (OSX)
– Opened OK in Excel (Windows)
– Opened OK in OpenXML SDK
So…maybe it’s just a Zip error.
EDIT: The Excel version on Windows is 2007.
