Help Excel question
 

Last night, I wanted to input some info but all , I mean all my files are clean with nothing on it. This is on my lap top also. What does this mean? Any thoughts? Am I in deep siht? I have not been on my desk top all day untill late night.

It says, file could not found. Check spelling of file name and verify location is correct.

If you are trying "File" and "Open" make sure at the bottom you are asking for ALL files

Regardless of extension.

If what daepp said does not work, did you save it to a thumb drive or disc then forget to reinsert said device? (it happens)

No, not to the thumb drive, and Deapp it isn't working. If anything happens to one file, I understand, but this happened to every single one of my Excel files including the ones on my lap top. The two computers are not linked in anyway.

Where are you saving your files?

hard disk

If your laptop and your PC no longer are showing .xls files on the same day on 2 different hard disks.....you probably have a virus from an email you opened on both devices or from....well one of those sites possibly.

What OS? You might try a System Restore.

I will try that.

My lap top had not been used or turned on for over a month. The last time data was inputted on my desk was 5 days ago. They are both Macs. I have no idea what operation system. I think Mt Lion. How can I find out ?

I'm no Microsoft expert and I work on a Mac. I had a similar issue and the problem was Office had lost my identity. I repaired my identity and all my files returned.

Just to make sure what the situation is. You have a desktop and a laptop, both Macs running OS X, maybe Mountain Lion. There are some Excel files on the desktop and the laptop (are they the same files, if so how do you keep them synchronized? Or are they different files?). Now all those files appear to have disappeared. Right?

Couple things I can think of:

1. Do a search using Finder. In other words, bypass Office/Excel, use the Mac OS to look for the files.

2. Are you logged in as your normal user? Any chance you logged out then logged back in as a different user, so you can't see the first user's folders?

3. Check your backups.

4. Any other files appear to be missing?

Otherwise - are you using iCloud or other offsite data storage site? Are you using a backup app? Are you using anything that tries to synchronize the desktop and notebook's files? Where did you keep the Excel files - in your user folder | Documents. or on your Desktop, or elsewhere?

If you know the name of an excel file, try searching for it using the search function up top, not in Excel. Once the file comes up, double click and see if Excel comes up automatically. If not, right click on the file, and select 'Open With' and select Excel, and check the box that says something like 'Open all such files with Excel''

-Z

Try File->Open Recent.

If none of the recent files open or are not found they were either deleted, moved or you saved them to a place other than your local hard drive. Thumbdrive, cloud......

but Word files that are saved works. I tried searching without luck. Anything else you guys can think of? I am going nuts. Nothing gets saved on a thumb drive or cloud

Can you 'see' the files in the folder hard drive where you originally saved them to?

If you double-click the hard drive icon on your desktop, and then click on 'look171' (or whatever userid you use), you should see a bunch of folders including 'Documents' which is the default location to save most files.

When you click 'open' file, you may not have the location pointing to the right folder.

-Z

If you are on Mt Lion, Open a new Finder window, click All my files from the left sidebar, view by list or icon.

Will show you every file you have broken out by category, look for xls, xlsx, csv

OK, Very strange. In two of my folders, all the files are back. All other excel files are still blank or it has this "File could not be found" thing pops up just like before. I did not do a thing to it. I am scratching my head now!

Files "blank" - you mean the folder is empty (appears to have no files in it)?

Check your Recycle Bin.

Yes, John. The icon is empty or blank and say files could not be found. I will look in my recycling bin

I found three files there. How the heck did it get there?

You dragged them to Recycle Bin, unless something weird indeed happened.

Anything else missing?

Are you able to see these files you've found using Excel, or are you only able to find them in Finder?

I found them in the trash. They are my business files. No way I dragged then in there. Only two were found in the recycling bin. Every year going back three years, for every project. Gone.

I've avoided chiming in - but the descriptions you are using on how you navigate, find files, etc. has me worried. Lots of advice, but I'm not hearing the kind of response that gives me comfort about where you are looking.

In hindsight it is easy for me to say back stuff up. But seriously, why are you not using a free online backup service? I have an online-cloud backup plus a connected external drive constantly backing my files up. I used to support a bunch of end users and saw people lose years of work when hard drives fail.

1) Are you using finder to look for files?
2) Does anyone else use this computer? Do you have a cat? Cats are evil, they do this sort of thing for sport.

One of my girls was complaining that her computer deleted files all on it own.

Told her it was not possible.

One day I hear her screaming bloddy murder.

Go by her desk and told her to retrace her steps exactly.

She recreates the file and then goes to save it in the "Temporary Folder".

I asked her why she saved it there.

She replied that she always saves her stuff to a temporary spot and then files them later so the temp folder seemed like a natural place to save things.

I then asked her if she was aware that the application she was using creates a Temporary Folder when it launches to store it's cache, undo and similar files and when she quits the application the folder deletes itself along with everything in it?

Blank stare.

Hey Don,

I went on to Finder and found some files but they are empty. When I go and click on them, the same thing appear on the screen. "could not find file". Could it be a bug that cause this? No cat in the house. Kids have their own computer.

No on line back up because I really don't know how and have never tried.

I think you'd better bring the computers to a local Mac repair guy, if you can find a good one.

I can think of a couple more things to try. 1. Shut down Macs and restart. 2. Disk Utility -> Verify Disk and Repair Permissions. 3. Re-install Office and try opening the files again. 4. Buy an anti-virus app and scan.

But honestly it is super weird that this is happening to both desktop Mac and notebook Mac. That is right? You are having the exact same problems on both machines - Excel files missing, mysteriously found in Trash, when you try to open them in Excel you get "can't find" message, and it started happening at the same time?

Normally at this poing I'd be suspecting corrupted files indicating impending hard drive failure. But on two machines at the same time?

BTW, are the hard drives nearly full by any chance?

It sounds like corrupt directory map.

The way a computer store data on a disc is it writes the files blocks on the disc. A file will span multiple blocks. They are not always linear or consecutive. A file can be scattered in pieces in multiple locations all over the drive.

Your computer has a file that keeps track of all the pieces and where they are.

When you erase a file you don't actually delete data. What happens is the name is removed form the map which allows new data to be written on the blocks that the "deleted" file occupies. So you never really erase data, you overwrite data.

If the map gets corrupt you can lose files because the computer can no longer find them.

Have you run disk utility repair yet?

My advice is that you not create, modify or do anything else that will write data to the disk.

The files are still there, just a bit lost right now. The more things you write to the disk the more likely you are to start overwriting them.

Yeah that's got me scratching my head also.

You have the Mac OS disc? You may (probably will) need it to repair the hard drive directory w/ Disk Utility. Read up on how to run Disk Utility, e.g.
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?

^This.

I think you should take the machine to the Apple store, make a genius appointment.

Thanks guys. Yes both the desktop computer (both macs) and lap top are doing the same thing (same files are missing). I am puzzled that it can happen to both. Again, my lap top have not been turned on in a month. When I discovered I can no longer access the file on my desk top a couple of days ago, I immediately check my lap top, because I store many of my files there. I suspect the files have gone the very same day. Yep, time to call in the big guns. It not worth screwing up more things as the files are important and I don't know what the hell I am doing. The hard disk is 25% full. John, I am tempted to try and perform the repair function of disk just to learn how things are done but I am afraid I am going to screw up more things.

Do corrupt directory map happen often? what causes it?

I can't think of anything that would cause that to happen to two separate machines other than you had some sort of cloud / syncing / offline backup service running that you were unaware of.

Were both machines purchased recently? Did they come with Mt Lion or were they upgraded to Mt Lion?

Click the Apple upper left and chose About This Mac. Just below the Apple logo in that window is a version number, what is it?

Mt Lion, by default, saves a lot of stuff, documents included to iCloud. Everyone has an iCloud account.

What happened sounds suspiciously like iCloud was enabled at one point then turned off. When that happens it removes the local copies.

Hmm, that sounds plausible - let's see what info look gives

Mac OS X verson 10.6.8- desk top

OS X verson 10.8.3 - lap top

10.6.8 ='s Snow Leopard and does NOT support iCloud

10.8.3 ='s Mt Lion and defaults to iCloud

Without having physical acces to both machines I'm stumped.

Apple store time.

Hmm, unless you had one of the old MobileMe / iDisk accounts on the desk top that got migrated to iCloud.

Did Office do an update on it's own?

What version of Office are you running?

Were they saved as .xlsx?

Yes. Office 2008