"Unknown or unsupported Excel file format." with embedded Excel document

[James Tait]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

I have been sent a Word document with an embedded Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately I am not able to attach a copy of the document as the contents are sensitive. When I open the document using OpenOffice.org Writer, I get an error dialog:

  "Read-Error.
   Unknown or unsupported Excel file format."

When I click OK, the Word document is displayed normally, but where the Excel spreadsheet should be is a rectangle with the Excel file name in it. When I click on the rectangle, it gets the green handles around it and pops up the Picture toolbar. I opened the Word document and the embedded Excel file perfectly before upgrading to Ubuntu 6.10. I got a colleague to send me just the Excel file and I can open it normally - the problem only exists when the file is embedded within the Word document.

I don't know (yet) which version of Office was used to create either the Word document, the embedded Excel file or the standalone Excel file.

[James Tait (jamestait)]

The standalone Excel file was saved from the embedded original using Excel 2002.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

- please recheck with OOo 2.2.0 from feisty
- please attach the test document if possible

[James Tait (jamestait)]

I seem to have mislaid my copy of the document, so I'm trying to get hold of a copy. The contents of both the Word document and the embedded Excel spreadsheet include confidential details of our and one of our clients' production environments, so I cannot make them available for general viewing.

[James Tait (jamestait)]

I got a copy of the document and downgraded to OOo 2.0.4 from Edgy to test. I still got the error message as expected, so I moved back up to OOo 2.2.0 from Feisty (I'm running Feisty anyway) and now I don't get the error message.

The embedded spreadsheet isn't displayed inline -- I get a rectangle with the Excel file name which, when clicked, displays the green handles around it and the style selector changes to "OLE". Double-clicking brings up the Excel spreadsheet in a separate Calc window. While this is a huge improvement over the previous behaviour, it's not quite what I'd hoped for. Could this be down to some setting which has had its default changed between the two releases? The spreadsheet is not displayed inline in Page Preview mode either.

For what it's worth, AbiWord doesn't show anything at all where the embedded spreadsheet should be.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for openoffice.org (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[NoBugs! (luke32j)]

I also noticed this bug in Openoffice 3.1, it gave an error when trying to open it. I installed Gnumeric and it was able to open the .xls file.