Ever wondered what the worst error message you could encounter might be? This ranks pretty highly.
Prologue: backup
First of all, remember how people always told you to take backups, rather as you were advised to wear sunscreen? Well, they were right. Bear that in mind as I take you through on a journey of mild technology pain.
The high: Sierra
Having not seen any reports of gigantic showstopping bugs in the upgrade to Mac OS Sierra, I took the plunge the other day. Things were going fine. Everything worked. Nothing had crashed. Then I updated Numbers from 3.6.2 to 4.0, whose “new” features are apparently collaboration – and nothing much else.
Having done that, I tried to open one of my most-used spreadsheets, into which I have poured years of experience and hours of analysis. I’d had it open before the update, but (I think) had closed it before updating. (Whether it was open or not is immaterial; some other spreadsheets were open before the update and opened fine afterwards; some were closed before the update and opened fine afterwards; some were closed before and wouldn’t open afterwards.)
I was met with this response:
The low: Numbers
The spreadsheet can’t be opened “for some reason”?? What sort of error message is that??
But at least it offers the option to “Browse all versions”, which should be stored in iCloud, where the spreadsheet itself is stored. You then go into a Time Machine interface, and get this:
It’s “unable to open version”. This happens no matter how far back you want to go. You can try with lots of “versions”. Or you can realise you’re onto a lost cause and give up. At which point the “Time Machine” interface resolves itself into a rectangle, in which you find this message:
Well, thanks a lot. “For some reason.” How this ever got past any sort of quality assurance I cannot imagine. Did the engineer/s assign an out-of-bounds error code to the problem, and the operating system can’t decide what to say and so falls back to “for some reason”?
This is a giant screwup
Whichever; it’s a terrible, terrible experience for the user. You’re left unable to open the file, with no idea what has gone wrong, and no clues how to progress. If you had really valuable stuff in here, and no means of rolling back, you would be absolutely furious – justifiably so – with Apple.
Tracing the error
What has gone wrong here? You can dig into iWork files (Numbers, Pages, Keynote). They’re “packages”, which means that they’re folders disguised to look like files. Control-click on the file and you can “view package contents”, which in the case of this spreadsheet looks like this:
Turns out that all the meat is in “index.zip”. I made a copy on my Desktop and unzipped it:
That’s only a few files; the “Tables” folder contains 523 items. Which of these hundreds of items is at fault? One? Two? Two hundred? There’s no way of knowing. Given that none of the previous versions will load under this version of Numbers, it doesn’t matter how many of the files are screwed. You can’t get there from here.
Why you love your backups
I did try to get around this. Believe me. On an iPad (which hadn’t updated to the equivalent newer version of Numbers) I tried opening the original spreadsheet.
Opened fine.
Oh. So I tried AirDrop to send the can-be-opened-from-iCloud spreadsheet from the iPad to the Mac. The AirDrop worked, but the Mac wouldn’t open it – same message as before. On the iPad, you can also export the file: your options are Numbers, Excel, PDF, or CSV.
Export in Numbers and AirDrop? Didn’t work.
Export in Excel and AirDrop? Worked – except that the various tables that had been on a single sheet were split out into separate sheets. Non-ideal.
So the iPad route wasn’t quite right.
But I wasn’t finished yet. Did you notice how I mentioned backups? Before upgrading, I had made a backup of my hard drive using SuperDuper! (highly recommended).
So I plugged in my backup drive – I’m always careful not to overwrite it until I’m confident a big OS update hasn’t screwed anything – and dug around for the old version of Numbers (v 3.6.2), and put that back in.
Open Numbers 362, try to open spreadsheet.
It opens. No muss, no fuss.
Worse than error messages: no error messages
In many ways, this is even worse. What’s the situation here? We have a newer version of Numbers on the Mac which cannot open an untouched version of a spreadsheet that the older version can open.
Together with the colossal stupidity of “for some reason” as an error message, a new version that randomly can’t open an old spreadsheet (but is fine with many others), even while the old one can, makes one think that whoever is in charge of Numbers, or iWork, isn’t getting it right.
A lot of it is down to the error message. If it said “because two of the files are corrupt” you might begin to understand. But of course it can’t be that, because the old version can read it. “Some reason” sounds vague – is vague – but in a sense, it’s accurate. Whatever the reason for being unable to open this file is, it’s quite elusive. I had initially thought that it was something to do with picture embeds, but the problem persisted when I got rid of those. (There’s nothing in the Console app about it, so Numbers clearly doesn’t want to share whatever its discomfort is with the file/s.)
Anyway. Having got the old version of Numbers installed, I could now open the old spreadsheet. Fine. I’ll stick with that, I thought.
The morning after the night before
Problem over, you think? Not at all. On returning to the iPad the next day, I found it had updated to the newer version of Numbers – the one with collaboration.
Guess what? That’s right: the iPad version no longer opened the old spreadsheet.
Computing often has these moments – when you feel as though you’re standing on a very rickety rope ladder across a gigantic chasm, halfway from each side, with little prospect of reaching either side safely, yet obliged to go in one direction or the other. The previous day I could open the spreadsheet on the iPad, but I couldn’t get it safely back to the Mac. Now I could open it fine on the Mac, but I couldn’t get the iPad to read it. Not really the world of device-independent operation that one dreams of.
But but but! There is a solution on the Mac. You can load the file on the old version of Numbers, and then in the File menu there’s the option to export it to a Numbers ’09 format. (No idea what’s so great/terrible about that.) Notice that that export option wasn’t available on the iPad.
Here’s what it looks like:
Worth a try, I thought. And indeed it was. I named the files created that way with an “09” suffix, and suddenly they opened on the iPad – with all the tables and charts intact.
Update: another tactic which I didn’t try, but which might work (I haven’t had the same problem again) is to log in to icloud.com and try to open or upload or similarly wrangle the file there. Make sure FIRST you have a backup of it, on a USB key or other cloud service; the greatest mistake is working on the only copy of an essential file.
Teachable moments
This is one of the biggest WTF moments in an episode replete with them. I’ve reinstalled an older version of Numbers, and exported to an even older file version, in order to open the file on the newest version. It’s beyond bizarre.
Thankfully, it seems that there aren’t too many people having this problem; my own searches on the phrase “can’t be opened for some reason” turned up pretty much nothing. If we’re all lucky, then nobody will land on this page via a web search; you’ll all just be reading it for abstract interest, wondering how an operating system and a QA team can ever let “can’t be opened for some reason” be signed off as “OK for public consumption”. Apple puts a premium on its products and prides itself on its user interface; this, though, is one that got away, badly.
But what if you haven’t kept that backup of the Numbers app? In that case, I’m not able to offer any help. Perhaps you can find a friend who has a copy of the older version. Perhaps there’s a trustworthy download site. Perhaps you can get one by finding a Mac that hasn’t been updated and sending the version there. Perhaps you can rummage around in your Time Machine backup and reanimate the old version. Maybe you have a CD in your house with an older version. (Clutching at straws here, but I recognise that spreadsheets carry a lot of our lives nowadays.)
The simplest solution is not to update Numbers, which of course always feels like admitting defeat. The pragmatic solution is to export all your spreadsheets to the 09 format. The belt-and-braces solution (since this might be an iCloud problem) is to duplicate your spreadsheets on your hard drive, and export each into the 09 format – then you have three copies of them.
Whichever – I hope it goes well. And I hope never ever to run into “some reason” as the explanation for why an essential piece of content can’t be accessed. Fix it, Apple.
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Yeah, feeling you pain on that Charles. Similar to an issue I had a few years back when Pages was updated and couldn’t open Pages files from earlier versions. I got a refund for the Mac app store Pages purchase and was advised to purchas an old copy of Pages 09 (on disc!) which would open the files and also be eligible for future app store updates.
So I did this and indeed got the updates once the app store / iCloud versions were once more capable of opening their own files! but then suddenly, despite being told an update is available I get a message as not possible as I had previously received a refund.
It’s all a great shame as I’ve purchased and used Apple’s ‘Office suite since the days it was Claris Works then Apple Works, then iWork and and it’s always, you know, just worked.
My invoice now have to be created on the iPad and although it mostly works, I cannot for the life of me find a way to create a formula in a table cell (in pages) even to just add a total of the above cells. So I have to add the figures up myself and type the total in (like an animal;)
You can, of course, create a new formula for a cell in Numbers for iOS as I have used it for my accounts but somehow it was deemed unimportant for table cells in Pages. Apple have been touting the iPad as a serious productivity tool for a while now so it’s odd to allow such an omission.
Incompatibilty and QC issues are even more of a concern.
Did you submit the file in a bug report or just write 1600 words about it?
One has to organise one’s thoughts first.
Had the exact same problem. Thanks a bunch for sharing the solution! I opened it on an old iPad and managed to export the file by email in XLSX, CSV and PDF. That file contained my entire business’ book keeping! Albeit a small home business, which is more of a hobby, but still.
I have the same problems with many of my files. This is quite a disaster. But i managed to fix it by simple steps. I have only tried it on one file so far, but it worked. Better make a backup that you modify this way, and note that it will remove all images in your numbers file:
1. Right-click on numbers file and open package.
2. Delete all of these:
a.) The folder “Data” (this seems to contain images only),
b.) The folder “Metadata”,
c.) And files “preview-micro.jpg”, “preview-web.jpg” and “preview.jpg”
When i did this, i could open the file, but not only that – i could open the original file also, that was not modified! And it now seem to work as it should.
Perhaps not all those files need to be deleted, but it may only be one or few of them. But i dont see any harm in removing Metadata and preview, since it will probably be reproduced anyways.
Thanks, Robert. That does sound like a good idea. I think the problem arises when there’s file corruption – some time after this my install began running slowly, which is a sure sign of disk problems, and Disk Utility confirmed it.
I just ran in to this issue opening an older Pages file. I’m currently running Pages 5.6.2. I was able open my file by right-clicking on it and choosing Open With … then … Pages (4.0).
Epic fail on Apple’s part really. Guess I’ll start using Word and Google Docs more – sorry Apple – get your stuff together and I’ll come back. 😉
Thanks for the work. I just tested this with a file created in Open Office Calc then exported in assorted Excel, CSV formats and Numbers ( ver 4.0.5 ) is giving me “can’t be opened for some reason”. “Collaborate & Die” or “Apple way or the highway”. More research is form of job security…
If OpenOffice created it then it might be corrrupt from the start. You could try using iCloud.com – something I overlooked.
Numbers can surely open csv.
Yes it did open the CSV. OpenOffice from the “start”?
Perhaps as I do not know your experiences. with OO, mine have been OK till recently updates from Apple.
Thank you for the post. I’ve just encountered this error while trying to open a spreadsheet I brought over from the PC that my MacBook is replacing. Some sheets opened ok – except for links being replaced by values – but this ‘for some reason’ message has appeared for one that has fairly simple contents. And I have Numbers 3.6.2… so I’m going to head out to the Apple store and see what they can do.
As it contains links it will be tricky, but you might try uploading the original Excel file into your account on icloud.com – that might be better at it.
Pages won’t sync across devices if Links are inserted to any field, diabolical!
Similar problem. I was getting the “cannot open file” message on an iPad. Ok. I’ll delete numbers app and reload from ap store. Selected numbers on AP store and clicked install.
Message. Your iPad OS is not recent enough. Can’t install. (And can’t update OS any further.
Great. I have stacks of spreadsheets on the ipad and can no longer access any of them.
I converted one to excel on my phone and emailed it to the iPad to open in the Excel app. Opened but view only.
I think you can guess what I think of Apple now😡😡
Did you try opening them on iCloud.com? You could try opening it there and then export it. Might work.
I think it was a little premature to delete the Numbers app. You might be able to get it from an iCloud or iTunes backup?
As for the one in the Excel app, copy the data and create a new spreadsheet. Or see if you can export it to CSV.
Greetings. I can open them on iCloud on a PC and export to docs in excel .
The point is though that the iOS numbers AP is now disabled on my iPad which is where I have been working for convenience.
I initially removed the numbers app because it had ceased to open spreadsheets, hence my attempt to reload it.
Re. The Sheet that opened in the excel app, it is read only unless I sign up to a Microsoft account. Many thanks for your suggestions though. I’ll see if the numbers AP is on iCloud, I hadn’t thought of that👍🏻
You have the gift of healing hands sir. Well the remote tech psychic version anyway.
I managed to resolve my problem by looking at “purchased apps” in my App Store instead of simply searching for numbers in the search field. I hit download and got the message asking if I wished to download the version compatible with my aging pad and so I did so.
Loaded and worked. Hooray!
Gawd bless you guv’nor.
Nick P
Glad to hear it, Nick. Always back up!
“For some reason”
With a big deadline ahead I almost had a stroke!!
Your article says it all! Thank you for that!
Extremely disappointing, frustrating, unprofessional error message from Appel.
Going back to Excel. My Numbers days are over!
Interesting. This thread started in 2016 and has now re-started after a break of almost two years. I’ve been having the same problem recently with a relatively simple (although large) spreadsheet and discovered that opening it and closing it on the iCloud website allowed it to open successfully on my elderly iMac whereas, it had previously only been possible to open it on my MacBook Pro.
Thanks for the great article. I discovered the same solution after two days of frustration. Not a fun time. Numbers “Help” was no help.
, thanks again,
Web
My wife just called me to the living room and said “I’ve got a problem”. I didn’t know what to expect, and when she showed me the dialog window that says “(Pages document) can’t be opened for some reason – To open this file, restore it to a previous version” on her MacBookPro running OS X El Capitan, I knew we were in for a treat.
Obviously, she clicked OK to see previous versions. Well, there were no versions available.
That’s when I put her iPad onto Airplane Mode and launched Pages. The document in question would load, no problems, and I immediately duplicated it, enabled Wi-Fi and had it upload to her iCloud account.
We then launched Pages again on her MacBookPro, tried to load the second copy – no luck, still the same error – and still the “Restore it to a previous version” with no actual versions to restore to.
So I went to her iCloud Drive -> Pages -folder and started using Quick Look to see if we could see anything. Also, duplicated the second file. Tried loading this 3rd copy of the file -> and it loaded.
There is no way for me to explain to my wife what went wrong, because I have no idea. She has a hard time handling macOSX after Windows, and is not a fan of the file management system. I took a screenshot of the error and started looking around for this.
I have had the same happen with a work colleague, who had the same “for some reason” issue with a deck he was working on using Keynote. I was able to rescue it, but even after duplicating it and doing the “Export from icloud.com as Powerpoint, import to Google Sheets as powerpoint, export from Google Sheets as powerpoint, load into Keynote and save as Keynote, does it load y/n?” work, I’m still confused as to how a regular user is supposed to handle these types of issues.
The first version we got going with Keynote was where he could load it, but after saving he could no longer load it. So I have a feeling my wife will have this issue, too, where after making modifications into the document and saving, she’ll not be able to load it again.
I want Apple to do a better job of this. This is not cool. Heads would have rolled if this happened during the previous management. Remember that picture of a “cheap QA guy” mentioned in a Keynote from the 2000s? Tim Cook isn’t that “cheap QA guy”.
What a pain. I’m still having the same trouble with numbers. A spreadsheet suddenly and inexplicably decides it can’t be opened along with the same stupid message. I can recover the sheet by opening in the cloud with a Windows machine and converting to excel and saving as excel. I can then email it to myself and the open it in numbers where it works again. ( yes I know this is ridiculous)
Alternatively I open the sheet on my iPhone 7 then export it as excel via email to myself.
Then…….open on my iPad with numbers and it is functioning again.
Stupid isn’t it. To think I Was on the verge of buying the new iPad Pro. Not anymore I’m not!
Anyone know of a Linux tablet?
Stop press. Never mind the Linux tablet idea.
Similar solution – export to google drive on the iPhone/iPad and abandon numbers, on the iPad at least.
Nick.
Oops! The google docs wants a new iPad as well.
I’ll abandon tablets with their dying apps and go back to old fashioned Microsoft office. That keeps going for decades.
For a cheap fix, get a $150 Chuwi Hi9 Air from Gearbest.com. I bought that one a while back to see how bad a $150 tablet with a relatively (for Android ^^) hi-spec SoC would be… and it isn’t. The sound sucks, but screen battery wifi and touch are good, and the general HW and SW has been w/o bug for the 6 months I’ve had it.
Bonus; there are plenty of .ZIP tools, including some file managers with unzip built-in. /snark
Alternatives are the 16:9 Amazon Fire HD 10, but I hate 16:9 and you’ve got to manually install the Google stuff on it, and the $300 Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 Plus but similarly, the Gobal version isn’t out yet, so you’ve got to sideload the Google for now. 8″ versions of all the above are cheaper if it’s for temporary pain relief.
Or you could use the web version the offending apps, or try out MS Office which I’ve found incredibly solid on the Android side.
Thank you for your suggestions sp.
At present I have transferred my affections to Google which appears to be working out ok.
Also, contrary to my first impressions my version of Pages also exports to google docs.
So, I’m ok at the moment. I have realised today that my iPad (the first Retina display version) is about 10 years old so perhaps I’m being a bit hard on on Apple with my ravings.
(I should add that I exported all necessary sheets to google docs from my iPhone, not the iPad). Anyway, a new tablet for Christmas I think.
Many thanks 👍🏻sp
Np
Thanks so much for getting me on the right path of a (temporary) solution to recover all my lost work from yesterday in a Numbers file. You’ve given me the idea of simply checking if I could save the damaged file into Dropbox, then open it on another device (my iPhone in this case), by viewing it on Dropbox on there and copying alle text (with Select all) and pasting into an email to myself. Won’t be using Numbers until there is a more permanent fix.
“For some reason” is indeed the most unhelpful error message one can add to a corrupted file, but you can always rely on the internet community, people like yourselves, to help out where Apple and the Help functions can’t. Thanks again!
Wow, 2018 and this bug is still here. The only way this error message could have been less helpful is if it had added an LOL at the end. It could have at least pointed to a funny meme or something so you wouldn’t feel so bad about losing all of your work. I guess nobody uses Numbers anymore?
The whole collaboration thing that they tried to do just doesn’t seem to work. Whenever I try to use it I always seem to end up with multiple versions of the same file with no idea of which is the most current, or things that I know that I typed but are now just missing. Or worse, just plain corrupted files that immediately crash the entire application and somehow all of the previous versions do the same thing.
I was able to open my file using the Preview app so I could at least see all the work I had lost forever. Weird that Preview can open it but Numbers across multiple devices and versions can’t.
I’ll keep it short. I received a new iPad for Christmas (thank you). Problem gone! I’ve always suspected saving to cloud modified to most up to date version of numbers. If your device cannot update to latest your screwed. Use something else (google sheets!) Happy new year Nick
>
I ran into the same problem described here. After fussing around with several other potential solutions, none of which worked, I rebooted the machine and the problem was gone!
April 2021 and I found this thread. It seems to have a life of its own. Or maybe Numbers just has a long agonizing death? Along with its users? What got me here was the reference to the Index folder/ files talk. I have an iPad Air 4th gen and tried Numbers seriously for the first time after puttering with it a bit (have used Excel forever on PCs). After spending several hours logging information on one of my collections, then leaving it for the evening, I come back today to find that only the last 6 of 89 records are there. The others are, poof, gone. After a lot of browsing, I think I’ve found a possible rescue via “versions”, whew! … except that Numbers app on iPad doesn’t give versions option. So I go to iCloud.com and access Numbers via my Apple account. Except I cannot browse anywhere other than iCloud (my shared drive is OneDrive bc we have Windows 365). When I go to OneDrive and open the file by double-clicking, I can see a version history. Ah ha, I think. This might work. Well … I tried uploading the file with iCloud Numbers’ upload tool. Nothing. Copying via Explorer does not retain any version information. In OneDrive, clicking on any version gives me two options, restore or open. Selecting either of these only downloads the Zip file with the above mentioned index/metadata folders (thus how I got here). There doesn’t seem to be a way to rebuild the spreadsheet from these files. Numbers does not recognize them. SO FRUSTRATING!!! Seems like this is a great way for users like me to dump Numbers right from the get-go. If I can’t somehow recover this file, for sure I will a Numbers-not user. Do you have any insight/ suggestions as to how I can work around recovering the data from the version history files on another drive?? Thanks.
All I can offer is what I suggested in the post – look at the Tables folder on a desktop machine. Possibly there’s a problem with saving to non-iCloud places. (I haven’t had this problem come up again since I wrote about it.)
Okay, thanks for getting back.