Mac OS X / Excel problem - recovered file causing endless crashing

December 4, 2008 4:00 AM

Mac OS X / Microsoft Office 2004 (Excel) crash and failed file recovery has left excel in an endless loop of restore and crash. Can anyone help me to find and delete the (unwanted) auto-saved excel sheet that is causing this problem?

The problem started when I imported a tab-delimited text file into excel. Upon import the entire program crashed with an error message "SYLK: file format is not valid". On it's own that would not be a big deal, and some googling suggests that it is a fairly common problem when dealing with non-excel formatted sheets, but the problem does not end there.

When I attempt to restart excel it 'helpfully' attempts to recover my file (whether I tick the "recover my work" check box or not) and then continues to be felled by the same bug/error and after displaying the "SYLK: file format is not valid" error it then exits again.

I am happy to lose the recovered file completely, but I don't know where to find it or how to force excel to ignore it. The file name that seems to be crashing it is "Workbook3 (version 1).xls [Recovered]". I have searched in Spotlight and (perhaps predictably) can't find anything by that name.

Any and all help gratefully received!

posted by urban greeting to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Unless you've changed the default location, auto saves live in under your Documents in a subdirectory called 'Microsoft User Data'.

~/Documents/Microsoft User Data

I find I've got to clean out work files and other auto save documents periodically.
posted by Mutant at 5:45 AM on December 4, 2008

Thanks Mutant. It turned out that Excel had (somehow) corrupted the original file rather than the recovered file. I deleted the original file and was then able to get back into Excel as normal.
posted by urban greeting at 11:15 AM on December 4, 2008

Nice tag.
posted by racingjs at 1:10 PM on December 4, 2008