Before you can do any damage — er, make changes — in an Excel 2003 workbook, you have to first open up the darn thing. To open a workbook, just click the Open button on the Standard toolbar (normally the one second from the left, with the picture of a file folder opening up), or you can choose File-->Open from the menu bar, or use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+O or Ctrl+F12.
However you open it, Excel displays the open dialog box similar to the one in Figure 1. Then you select the workbook file you want to work on from the list box in the middle of the Open dialog box.
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Figure 1: Use the Open dialog to find and open a workbook for editing. |
The pop-up menu attached to the Open button in the Open dialog enables you to open the selected workbook file(s) in special ways. These ways include the following:
- Open Read Only: This command opens the files you select in the Open dialog box's list box in a read-only state, which means that you can look but you can't touch (actually, you can touch, you just can't save your changes). To save changes in a read-only file, you must use the File-->Save As command from the Excel menu bar and give the workbook file a new filename.
- Open as Copy: This command opens a copy of the files you select in the Open dialog box. Use this method of file-opening as a safety net: If you mess up the copies, you always have the originals to fall back on.
- Open in Browser: This command opens workbook files you save as Web pages in your favorite Web browser (which would normally be Microsoft Internet Explorer). Note that this command is not available unless the program identifies that the selected file or files were saved as Web pages rather than plain old Excel worksheet files.
- Open and Repair: This command attempts to repair corrupted workbook files before opening them in Excel. When you select this command, a dialog box appears giving you a choice between attempting to repair the corrupted file and opening the recovered version and extracting the data out of the corrupted file and placing it in a new workbook (which you can save with the File-->Save command). Click the Repair button to attempt to recover and open the file. Click the Extract Data button if you previously tried unsuccessfully to have Excel repair the file.
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