[shrakner]

My family upgraded from OS 9 to Panther a while ago, and now my dad can't read his old Excel 4 files. I backed up all his files in img's before upgrading so that all the resource information should have been preserved. OS X recognizes the files as Excel 4 documents, but when Excel X opens them, the file is hopelessly garbled. Even more strange, when he restarts in OS 9, copies a spreadsheet from the img ondo the hard drive, and then restarts in Panther, Excel X reads the file just fine. Can anyone explain this bizarre behavior, and how to correct the files? He hasn't yet tried other spreadsheets to see if the OS 9 trick works for them.

[tooki]

What kind of disk are the files on? If it's not a Mac-formatted disk (e.g. a PC-formatted floppy or Zip disk), it may cause problems, because OS 9 and OS X store (and read) Mac files on PC disks differently.

tooki

[shrakner]

It is on a Mac formatted drive (OS X, Extended, to be precise), but as long as the files are in a disk image, it shouldn't matter anyway.

[Apfhex]

Do the files have suffixes? You IMGed them to preserve the resource forks, but maybe Excel X doesn't recognize those and thinks the files are different?

I suppose if copying them while booted in OS 9 works, then that would solve the problem?

[shrakner]

My dad tried changing the sufffix to .xls, but Excel X still opens the files as garbled code.