when i open an old excel file i have an message comes up 'excel found unreadable content in '....xls'.Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook,click yes'.when i click yes nothing happens the files just fails to load same thing if i press no

The implication of the message is that the file is corrupt. Clicking 'Yes' in such circumstances doesn't guarantee that anything will be retrieved - it all depends on how badly damaged the file is.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

is there any hope of retrieving the file?

I have read that some success was booked retrieving sheets by opening the file in Openoffice ( or Libreoffice) which you can download freely

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