Help!
For all you computer people. I have a file on a disc that is a spreadsheet .xls . Now it won't open in the microsoft thing that opens it, excel I think. I use it at the new clinical site, so I'm not sure. It's now saying that the file is read only, but when I checked the properties, the file doesn't say that. Is there any way to fix this? It's a drug inventory that we must get.

Wait. Are you trying to access it though the disk itself? Or did you save it to the hard drive?

Read-only simply means you can't write to the file. You should still be able to view the contents. First thing. Is this a floppy disk? or a CD-Rom Disc? If it's the former then there is a black slider on the back in the upper left corner. The up position is read-only, and the down position is read-write. If that isn't the problem, but you're able to open the file at least to view it, then you can do a save-as and save it as a different file name and manipulate the new file. The only other technique I have in my arsnel is to use OpenOffice to open the file. It's capable fo reading .xls files just like Excel, and best of all it's free.

It won't open even to view it. It's a floppy disk. I'll try looking at the back of it. I never noticed that thing on the back before. I have a disk here at home that started doing that long ago, wonder if I can still find it and check it out. thanks