Excel: File Error - Some number formats may have been lost

[rosiemac]

I have prepared a spreadsheet in Excel 2003 and sent it out to people in my company around the world to use. For most people it is fine, however, I have been contacted by one person in China and one in Korea who receive the following message when they open the file, despite that they are also on Excel 2003:

File Error: Some number formats may have been lost

Any thoughts on what I can suggest to them? Or will it not be a problem?

 

[Stormseed]

I had read about this on some website at the time I experienced this error around a couple of years back but I do not remember the name of that website. Tell the person in China or Korea to perform the following steps:

In that workbook, Press Ctrl+1, Number tab, In Category, select Custom. In the Type field on the right, start selecting all the custom formats one by one. If you see the "Delete" option enabled, you would need to Delete that format incase you no longer use it. Do this for all the formats and then try opening the file again.

Also, give a look to this webpage:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/171279