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I copied a file from a floppy disk to my hard drive. It is an excel spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet there are alot of funny looking symbols that I cannot read. Some information is readable but most is not. I no longer have the floppy disk. The files were corrupted on the floppy when I got it but I no longer have it.

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Did you create that document yourself and was it looking ok before on your machine? If the file is corrupted it is very unlikely that Excel is still able to display anything meaningful. The unreadable content might be related to an encoding/font problem or the file might not be a valid Excel (BIFF8) file. – 0xA3 Sep 24 '09 at 23:05
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if you copy a file from floppy disk to your hard disk and the file is corrupted or otherwise unreadble, the copy process will be aborted with an according error message, unless you're using a special software allowing to copy damaged files partially (e.g. Unstoppable Copier).

since you have copied the file without error, i suppose the excel spreadsheet has been created with an older version of Excel and thus you're dealing with a compatibility issue rather than file corruption.

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This isn't always true. I've run into cases where I opened an Office file directly off the floppy drive in my computer, and the file was corrupt. The corrupt file would even copy successfully to my computer. However, when the disk was re-inserted into the original computer, the file would open just fine. Both computers even had the same version of Office. I think it just so happened that the read/write heads were misaligned in one or both of the floppy drives. – rob Sep 24 '09 at 23:37
Floppy drives are notoriously finicky, after all... – Nathaniel Sep 25 '09 at 0:22
that they are :) – Molly7244 Sep 25 '09 at 0:31
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