MS Excel provides various services to the users like loading, sharing and calculating excel formulas. It keeps all the data in a tabular form for the purpose of easy management and accessing. In some situations, excel fails to open the workbook and load them into memory. The files that are in MS Excel are by default saved in binary file format in 2003 as well as its earlier versions, whereas the latest version of Excel 2007 uses XML-based format. Excel files can get damaged due to several reasons such as virus attack, network issues, application errors, unexpected shutdown etc. Sometimes while publishing excel workbook on excel services and loading them to a browser, you may encounter several error messages including:
"Unable to Load Workbook The workbook that you selected cannot be opened. The workbook may be in an unsupported file format, or it may be corrupt. Would you like to try and open this file in Excel?"

As a result of this error, your crucial data will become inaccessible which may further result in severe data loss consequences. If you are having an updated backup with you, then you may restore the data using it. This situation generally arises due to incompatible file format or some sort of corruption within the excel files.

          

If the excel is created in excel and you are trying to save the file in excel format which uses caret operator for denoting space character and exponentiation, you may get this error message. If a carat operation along with space characters used by you is causing the error, you should delete the space and then again try to load workbook. Such problems can be resolved by using third-party excel repair tools. These tools are especially designed to resolve all your excel errors including "Unable to Load Workbook The workbook that you selected cannot be opened.” excel errors. These tools are highly advanced which are capable of scanning your entire damaged excel files and further restoring them to their original format.