Does anyone know how to open survey data that was downloaded as an Excel file? It tells me the format is wrong or the data is corrupted.

The message I always get when opening a downloaded classmate file with the Excel option is shown in the attachment. As I recall it has to do with the file extension name. I just go ahead, click on yes and everything is fine.

I am unable to read the file. Tried using Sheets and Ecxel. When using Excel it says file format is not supported. I even tried a spreadsheet reader. Same issue. Must be rather old format.

Thinking that perhaps the difficulty has something to do with downloading from the survey (as opposed to classmate) I've now tried that too. Same message as above but can open the file fine in Excel. I'm using the Subscription Product Microsoft 365.

Those "Excel" downloads with a .xls file type were (and may still be) created using an older alternative .xls format where the content is HTML coding instead of native Microsoft Office's Excel coding. You can see that if you open one of those .xls files using Notepad, and they will display when opened in a browser like Firefox, Chrome, or Edge which interpret HTML.

I have an older version of Office, and used to get the warning message until Microsoft released a registry entry that allowed Excel to continue to open those files without warning. That registry entry may not be available for newer versions of Office since it was considered a security risk as anyone could have easily modified the HTML coded spreadsheets. Newer versions of Excel may no longer even recognize that older HTML coding.

That is the problem. I changed the xls extension to html and was able to read it. Kinda sucks but thanks for your insight.

That works fine for viewing, but not when you want to actually open the file in Excel to search, sort, or modify entries.

Back in 2016 when we first encountered this problem, we found a way under older Excel versions from 2007 through 2016 to get the data imported into Excel. {Click Here} That may or may not still work in newer versions of Excel.

At that time in 2016, we pressed Class Creator to begin sending us a 'real' Excel file, but it does not look like that ever happened.

Excel 2019 reads html formatted again although it bitches about the format.

Wish we could just get a cab file

I want a pony