Hi.
I have upgraded my laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. But after upgrading i cannot open one very important xls file which was on my flash drive.
Getting a message saying 'Excel file can not be accessed'.

Any thoughts please?
Thanks

Find a friend, colleague or facility that has Windows 8.1. Confirm, thereby, that the problem is with the Windows version change and not an issue with the flash drive.

If the file can be accessed on the 8.1 system try emailing it back to you and see if you can then access it.

Can't, offhand, think of anything else.

Download Apache OpenOffice and try whether it's able to open your .xls file (first copy it from flash drive to regular disk).

 

Some applications won't be able to open proper file, if they request read-write-exclusive IO mode, when they're on read-only medium, or when somebody else already has read-write access to the same file. Copying file to new location on HDD can help in such situation.

Edited August 30, 20178 yr by Sensei

49 minutes ago, Sensei said:

Download Apache OpenOffice and try whether it's able to open your .xls file (first copy it from flash drive to regular disk).

FYI, Apache OpenOffice is basically dead, and development has stalled; most work is being done on LibreOffice, which has many of the original developers working on it.

Worth a shot to see if it can open the file.

Make a copy of it and rename the copy to .csv and/or .txt and see if it opens those, if so then resave it in the correct .xlsx format. If it works you may lose some formatting.

Also you can try to upload your spreadsheet to this Excel repair service https://onlinefile.repair/en/excel.html an re-open the file.