Excel for Mac question

I tried to open a file with Excel for Mac. I get the ‘beach ball’ and the file does not load. I can’t cancel out of it, nor Force Quit. I logged onto VPN and opened the file successfully on my office PC. I tried opening another Excel file on the Mac and I was successful. The file that failed to open isn’t very large. What would cause it to not load?

(Since I can open it remotely on my PC via the VPN connection, it’s not that big a problem; but it’s still strange I can’t open it locally.)

What version of Excel for Mac are you using? I believe that Office 2008 for Mac does not support Visual Basic for Applications code in files, so if you’re using 2008 and the file was created on a PC and includes VBA code, it would not work. But that’s just a guess; I have never used Office on a Mac.

It’s Excel 2004 for Mac, version 11.0

Although I’ve discovered there’s an update to 11.3.5, which I’m installing now.