trouble opening excel spread sheets

I don't have an answer for you, but my work Dell does this as well, running Office 2007.

 

Office for Mac has been giving me a lot of trouble (but not your problem), and the only solutions I have found to work are either:

1) Reinstall OS X, update it, install office

or

2) Just use Open Office (openoffice.org)

I know this isn't the answer you were looking for, but it may be something worth considering. If you have excel in your dock, what happens when you click and drag the file to the excel icon?

 

MR User nadyne might be your best bet
Works for the Mac Business Unit for MS

Check here and send a PM

Always been helpful and kind to me

 

Try right-clicking (or CTRL-click) on one of the troublesome files and select "Get Info". What program is stated under "Open With:" ? If it's not Excel, select this from the menu, and also try using the Change All... button which should help with all your other files.

 

Maybe your Excel preferences file (.plist) is corrupt

com.microsoft.Excel.prefs.plist

In 10.5.8 it's found in Users/MyUserName/Library/Preferences/Microsoft

I also have com.microsoft.Excel.plist in Users/MyUserName/Library/Preferences

If you have both, try this one at a time:
Move plist file to Desktop when Excel is not running
Go into Excel (this creates a new plist file)
Try to open a balky document
Did it work?

If not, try a different user account.

 

You don't seem to understand the user account thing. I'm saying that there may be a mysterious problem with your user account. Since the problem wasn't the plist file (which is in your user account) it might be something else that I have no idea how to diagnose.

Generally, the next step after that fails is to log in to your computer under another account. Frequently, that account will work just fine. Then you have to go through a process of transferring files out of the original account before you get rid of it. If you don't have a second account, you'll have to create it.

If you take the files to another computer, and they work fine, but still don't work on yours, all you've proven is that there's nothing wrong with the files themselves. That will bring you back to the conclusion that there's something wrong in your user account.

Hoping that explanation helps...