Open xls files in numbers

When I get an attachment in my email .xls I cannot open it on my email nor with numbers.  .xlsx is to a problem.   How do I resolve this?

Hi - thank you for your responses.  I don't have an iPad so testing is all being done on site.
The report is based on three tabs, each producing a basic table with data in.  I can create the reports in CSV and they work fine although the format is all wrong (no tabs etc etc) - but that would lead me to believe that it is nothing in the actual data which is causing the load error.  It also seems fairly intermittent, so I tested with a few different file sizes to make sure it wasn't this - and again nothing too conclusive there.
I presume quicklook is the built in function to view a file, I spotted this today but again it won't open in that or then again when asked to open in Numbers.
Hunting around this forum it seems there is some issue in general with opening some XLS files (especially ones created by SSRS) depending on iOS version, so that is the route I will be looking at tomorrow.  Putting these files through a save loop in excel isn't really an option, so I am going to test with a go between e-mail tomorrow which has in some cases seemed to do the trick - maybe appending something to the original file.  Some other posts have suggested that an XLSX file seems to work a lot better and that is supported in MS SQL 2012 which is on the way for our customers at some point.
Definitely an awkward one!
Thanks,
Pete

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