Microsoft KB Archive/Z10111

= XL97: Characters Lost Saving to Excel 5.0/95 File Format =

Article ID: 10111

Article Last Modified on 11/16/2006

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Excel 97 Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q10111



NOTE: This article contains information about editing the registry. Before you edit the registry, make sure you understand how to restore it if a problem occurs. For information about how to do this, view the &quot;Restoring the Registry&quot; Help topic in Regedit.exe or the &quot;Restoring a Registry Key&quot; Help topic in Regedt32.exe.



SYMPTOMS
When you save a file that contains Greek characters or certain multilingual characters to the &quot;Microsoft Excel 5.0/95 Workbook&quot; file format, some characters may be replaced by a question mark (?).



CAUSE
This problem occurs if the characters do not exist in the default system code page.



RESOLUTION
Follow these steps to correct this problem:

 Obtain and install Microsoft Excel 97 Service Release 2 (SR-2).

For additional information about SR-2, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

151261 OFF97: How to Obtain and Install MS Office 97 SR-2

 After you install Microsoft Excel 97 SR-2, you must add a key to the Windows Registry that specifies which code page to use when you save an Excel file to an earlier file format. To do this, follow these steps:

 Click Run on the Start menu. Type regedit in the Open box and then click OK.  In the Registry Editor, expand the following key:          HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Excel\ Microsoft Excel  On the Edit menu, point to New and click DWORD Value. With New Value #1 selected, type OldExcelSaveCodePage, and then press ENTER.</li> With the value OldExcelSaveCodePage selected, click Modify on the Edit menu.</li>  In the Edit DWORD Value dialog box, click Decimal. Type the value for the code page that you wish to use in the Value Data box, and then click OK.

Values for some of the most commonly used code pages are listed in the following table: <pre class="fixed_text">      Language                      Code Page ---

English                       1252 French                        1252 German                        1252 Spanish                       1252 Italian                       1252 Dutch                         1252 Brazilian                     1252 Swedish                       1252 Danish                        1252 Norwegian                     1252 Finnish                       1252 Portuguese                    1252 Catalan                       1252 Polish                        1250 Hungarian                     1250 Czech                         1250 Slovenian                     1250 Romanian                      1250 Croatian                      1250 Slovakian                     1250 Serbian (Latin)               1250 Albanian                      1250 Greek                         1253 Russian                       1251 Ukrainian                     1251 Bulgarian Serbian (Cyrillic)  1251 Belarussian                   1251 Turkish                       1254 </li></ol> </li></ol>

NOTE: Setting the OldExcelSaveCodePage value in the registry does not affect previously saved files.

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STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Excel 97 for Windows. This problem was corrected in Microsoft Office 97 Service Release 2 (SR-2).

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MORE INFORMATION
Microsoft Excel 97 allows you to enter characters from more than one of the ANSI (8 bit) code pages. When you save your file to the &quot;Microsoft Excel 5.0/95 Workbook&quot; format, all the characters are converted to the Unicode characters for the code page that is defined as the system default code page. If the default code page does not contain a character that is available in the active code page, the character may be converted to a question mark.

Additional query words: XL97

Keywords: kbbug kbfix KB10111

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