FAQ: CoolSpools Excel and Windows 7

I'm running CoolSpools PLUS, CoolSpools V5 or Slipstream V4 and am having problems opening Excel files on Windows 7

There was a known problem - now fixed - with Excel files created by CoolSpools PLUS, CoolSpools V5 or Slipstream V4 (or any earlier versions of CoolSpools or Slipstream) that meant that any version of Excel would give a file open error when you tried to open those files under Windows 7.

Please note that the version of Excel is (surprisingly, perhaps) not relevant here: it is the version of Windows that is significant.

We believe that a minor formatting error in the Excel OLE Compound File wrapper that was tolerated by earlier versions of Windows is no longer tolerated by Windows 7.

This issue was fixed before CoolSpools V6 was released and fixes are also available for both CoolSpools V5 and Slipstream V4.

The relevant fixes/PTFs were all released on 2009-11-21 and are:

To check your PTF level, do the relevant command from the table below:

If the result of running the relevant command from the table above is "No PTFs", this simply means that you have not applied any PTFs since you installed the software. It is still possible that the code you originally installed already included the relevant fix. You can check this by running the command shown below and examining the program creation date: if the date is 2009-11-21 of later, you already have the Windows 7 fix and do not need to apply PTFs for this issue.

If you believe you do not already have the relevant fix, and intend using Windows 7, you should install the latest fix pack for CoolSpools PLUS, CoolSpools V5 or Slipstream V4 if you have not already done so.