Opening Corrupt Excel files

Sometimes one gets unlucky and a file is corrupted. This may result in the file not opening at all or in error messages during opening.

Here are some options to try and open a corrupt file or retrieve information out of it.

Set calculation to manual( Open Excel, Choose Tools, Options from the menu, click the Calculation tab and choose Manual. Hit OK. Now try to open the file.
Open the file, but disable macros (assuming you've set macro security to medium: Tools, Macro, security)
As soon as you've clicked the disable macros button, press control-pageup or control-pagedown, thus changing sheets. Sometimes the corruption is inside a chart on a specific sheet, changing the sheet to another may prevent a crash, enabling you to copy the other sheets.

If that does not work, try creating a link to the file in an empty cell in a fresh workbook. Type this formula (adapt path, filename and sheetname):

='c:\my documents\[MyFileName.xls]Sheet1'!A1

and copy right and down. This at may get you the worksheets values.

if you don't know the sheet names, omit it by entering this:

='C:\PathToFile\[MyFileName.xls]'!A1

and press enter. If XL (2000) is able to extract them, it will prompt you for a sheet name.

Sometimes the Excel viewer, Word or even Internet explorer (v5) enables you to open the file and copy information out of it.

If the file is not protected, maybe you can open it with OpenOffice (www.Openoffice.org).

Also, Excel XP and 2003 can sometimes repair XL files with trouble. Simply choose File, open, select the problem file and instead of simply hitting the "Open" button, click to the right of it on its tiny down arrow to expose more options (see screenshot below)

Finally, sometimes a corrupt file that still can be opened, can be cured using this method (Excel 2000 or up):

Open the file
Save-as filetype Webpage
Close the file
Open the html file
Save-as normal Excel workbook.

Comments

Showing last 8 comments of 41 in total (Show All Comments):

Comment by: Barrie Porter (3/12/2009 4:51:41 AM)

Thank you so much for all the help.

The spreadsheet is not crashing anymore. Manages to movie it into a new workbook.

Yes , i have told trend to skip xlsx and xlsm files.

Thanks again so much for the help and the fast response.

Thank you.

Comment by: Barrie Porter (3/24/2009 5:17:38 AM)

Hi,

We are still getting these errors even in different spreadsheets.

ID: 1, Application Name: Microsoft Office Excel, Application Version: 12.0.6331.5000, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.6215.1000. This session lasted 12798 seconds with 5520 seconds of active time. This session ended with a crash.

Faulting application excel.exe, version 12.0.6331.5000, stamp 48fa2869, faulting module excel.exe, version 12.0.6331.5000, stamp 48fa2869, debug? 0, fault address 0x003bf165.

Excel will be working fine the whole day then suddenly just crash.

I have stopped trend officescan from scanning xls and xlsm and we still end up having sharing violations.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Comment by: Jan Karel Pieterse (3/24/2009 10:54:21 AM)

Hi Barrie,

Have you tried removing the Excel entry in the registry?
Another thing to try is to remove the user profile from the system.

Comment by: Barrie (3/25/2009 4:04:01 AM)

Hi,

Yes , I have removed the entry in the registry and it works for a while then crashes again. I have redone the laptop and installed excel 2007 with SP1. I have got another laptop to test on and will see if it works on that one.

I have not yet gone so far as to remove my account from active directory and then rebuild the laptop from scratch with the new account. That will be the last thing that i try.

I will let you know if i can find any solution to the problem.

Thanks for all the help again.

Funny thing : Under excel 2003 it works fine.

Comment by: Barrie (3/25/2009 1:35:20 PM)

Hi,

Found a solution to the issue.

It was Windows Search 4.

Removed it and the spreadsheet has not crashed and I have not had any sharing violations either.

Thanks again for all the help.

Great site !!

Comment by: Jan Karel Pieterse (3/25/2009 10:18:58 PM)

Hi Barrie,

Great! Thanks for letting us know.

Comment by: Ganesh (6/26/2009 12:05:29 AM)

ofiice 2003 excel crashes when closing.
I am use VBA macro for close-
Workbooks("Test_Excel.xls").Close (False)

excel get close but gives prompt to restart excel & also send crash information to microsoft.

I want to shedule Excel for automaticaly open & close.

Comment by: Jan Karel Pieterse (6/26/2009 4:03:46 AM)

Hi Ganesh,

The code to close Excel itself is Application.Quit
The crash itself may be due to a corruption in your file, but could also be caused by your code. One thing that crashes Excel is if you have a userform which is using a class module e.g. for events or for resizing and you do not set the instance(s) variable(s) of the class to nothing when unloading the form.

Opening Corrupt Excel files

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