If you are using Crystal Reports version 8.5 and Microsoft Excel 2003 with Service Pack 3, you have probably seen the message “File error: data has been lost” when opening an Excel file created by the Crystal 8.5 export. Usually, I have not noticed any actual data loss, but yesterday I did. The problem seems to become acute when there are multiple subreports on a line in the Crystal report.

The solution is to open the spreadsheet in Calc from the OpenOffice suite, available for free from OpenOffice.org. The spreadsheet that had problems in Excel opened flawlessly in Calc.