Hi Alice,
I am glad to assist you.
There are possible causes for this error.
If you’re using an unsupported Excel file format or maybe the file is corrupted due to sudden power off. And when opening an older version of the excel file in a new version on MS Office, this error may occur.
And here are the solutions you can use to solve the error:
Solution 1: Change the default file format.
Try changing the Excel default file format by following these steps:
- In Excel 2010 and newer versions, click on the File menu.
- In the Info screen that appears, click on Options.
- In the ‘Excel Options’ window, under the Save workbooks section, click on the Save files in this file format: drop-down. Select a file format (i.e., the one supported by your Excel version).
- Click OK.
Check if you can open your Excel file. If not, try the next solution.
Solution 2: Edit the excel file permissions
Follow these steps to change the file permissions and see if it fixes the problem:
- Right-click on the file that will not open and click Properties.
- In the file properties dialog box, click the Security tab and then hit the Edit button.
- When the file’s permissions dialog box appears, click on the Add button.
- Click on the advanced button from the ‘Select Users or Groups’ window.
- Select Find Now. A list of all users and groups will be displayed in a search results box. Choose everyone's group from the list and hit OK.
- You can see the ‘Everyone’ group in the ‘Enter the object names to select’ textbox. Click OK once again to return to the file’s permission dialog box.
- Click everyone from the Group or user names: box and check all the checkboxes under Allow.
- Click on Apply and then OK.
Now try to open the Excel file. If you’re still getting the Excel file cannot open error, you can refer the following article:
https://medium.com/@priyanka.chouhan40/how-to-fix-excel-wont-open-in-windows-10-issue-f408d9a10ef