Every month for several years I have accessed my own spreadsheet offline from desktop icon.
To utter consternation and increasing frustration, today OPEN brought up the file BUT can do nothing with it.
Same results with backups on different drives.

Consequently told browse to find program from which can OPEN. Obvious choice MSN Excel. Result: "Cannot find any version ...to open file for edit".

Further on I installed msn xlviewer. In Open process came box, "Office Source Engine (Process ID: 2120) running. Need to Close". How/where to do so no idea. I am on Vista Ultimate with !E7; note not included in list for this item.

FYI, I only have Office 2002 (with Excel 2002), but cannot even remember last time I used it for anything. Also note many MSN references to Office 2003, but hardly ever 2002.
Point is, HOW CAN I GET BACK WHERE I WAS & NOT BE REFERRED TO NEED FOR A PROGRAM (EXCEL)?
Only secondarily (and reluctantly) interested in making Excel function to restore ability to use my spreadsheet.

I will be most grateful for help in this unexpected problem.

try a repair install of office from the office cd/dvd. when setup starts choose repair.

Thank you so much, Surfer.

When Opened Office 2002, no Repair item appeared. Went through a considerable number of files/programs/items and only reference found thereon and at Search was at one of the READ MEs: Automatic Repair having to do with Windows 2000 upgrade.

I did find and install RESOURCES KIT. One of its subcategories had a Repair function and this was downloaded/installed successfully. What effect it may have on my problem remains to be seen, but I wanted you to know my followup on your suggestion.

If you have any comment or further guidance please advise.

Cordially, RO

that's strange. ok...try the uninstall/repair from Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel. should be a repair option there.

Reminds me of a situation which made my life hell. I need to work in Excel for making reports of my projects and was doing the same one day when my PC hung up. With no other alternative I had to press the reset button ( I tried the other methods of Ending Task etc before this). On reboot I got an error message from Windows and it would not boot up.
With no options I had to format my hard drive and all the saved Excel documents were in D: To my horror when I tried to open them I got this message:
<filename> cannot be accessed this file may be read only and blah blah.. I could digest this if this happened to a single file but all the excel files in that drive had the same thing to say. Tried repair Excel software from searching the net but they could not help me too. Consequently I lost important data!
What do you make of this friends?

is the excel data gone? if not try openoffice. it's free and does do all ms file formats.

OpenOffice.org version 3 is here
http://www.openoffice.org/