Corrupted Excel File

[Alvinho]

Ok, so I've googled the thread title, and have found many different options to repair my file, none of which seem to be working. The built-in repair option excel has isn't working either.

The whole "save as another file type" thing seems to be a no go since I can't open the file.

I've opened the filed on WordPad, and it was just a nonsensical gibberish. Saving it to another format just reproduced sad gibberish.

I've even downloaded some of the programs that claim to restore corrupted excel files, but no go.

Running kind of desperate here since one of these files (there are two) contains my overtime hours for the whole month, and will suck big time if I can't claim these.

I keep getting the an "Excel cannot open the file "filename.xlsx" because the file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file." error, and can't seem to fix it.

inb4 backup. Any ideas? Thanks.

[Sevilla]

The purpose of opening the on notepad is to figure if the file should be what the extension it has appended. It isn't all gibberish, if you look through you should be able to pick up some references to excel

Example:

   Ò  xl/_rels/workbook.xml.relsPK
-      ! e/àîs
  h               	  xl/workbook.xmlPK
-      ! ÐÌH”H  ì  
             ¼
  xl/styles.xmlPK
-      ! :ŽÝKÖ  9¤               /
  xl/worksheets/sheet2.xmlPK
-      ! ûb¥m”  §               ;#

This was found towards the end of the xlsx file.

But something you may want to try is use OpenOffice's Excel. If you want maybe try opeing it with Google Docs. Is hard to figure out if it even is salvageable with out the file. But this is understandable because of privacy and such.

[The Stig]

Slightly farfetched here but seeing what you tried, here is what I would attempt next:

- try opening the file in other apps that can open spreadsheets.... Open Office, Star Office or whatever the hell they call it, Google Docs even
- do you have a unix OS available? Try porting the file there and getting someone to open it for you, you might recover more than what you bargained for, or partially recover
- following the above, I'm not knowledgable on tablets but perhaps try to open it with an office app for tablets... you'll never know. So many different machines these days
- back to windows have you tried to import the file instead of directly opening it? (in excel)
- and.... try other microsoft excels if available to you (365?)

That's all I can think of! hope it helps (i too am not confident, i hate file/disk corruption)

[Elizara]

Another option is Libreoffice (I find OpenOffice now a days to be too big a bloatware)

It may not work though, I wish you luck.

[orinthia]

If it's an excel 2010 or 2013 based file, you should be able to open it with any zip utility. I recommend 7zip, since it's free and works with a lot of different formats. Most, if not all office 2010/2013 files are archives with xml innards.

Once inside, you'll get a folder structure. You should be able to locate a worksheets folder. From here you could probably create a new worksheet with some dummy crap in it, save as a new file, and inject your older file's xml parts into it. Maybe, I've not actually tried this, but something like this makes sense in my head. lol.

Though, if the archive is actually corrupt, you may be able to salvage some of it. Hopefully the worksheets are good, but that's always a crap shoot.

[Alvinho]

I did try LibreOffice, Excel 2010 starter, Excel Viewer 2007, and Excel 2013. All duds.

No Unix system available, also no tablets I can think of. Trying 7zip since I already have it.

Also, pretty sure my flash drive is gone too. I've cleaned the partition, remade it, etc. but it won't format NTFS, only in FAT32. If I try to format it as a volume, it becomes RAW.

As it's just a bunch of times and whatnot, I feel comfortable providing the file if you guys want to take a stab at it.

[Alvinho]

7Zip also didn't seem to work, nor did importing from excel (not sure if I did correctly, however).

[Alvinho]

Some backstory if it helps (on my way to a triple post):

I used my usb drive on my co-worker's computer, and that's when all this shit storm happened. I lost some other files (including .pdf and .txt files) I had backed up (last backup July 15th) , so I didn't really make a big deal about it. Out of the 3 .xlsx files I had, I opened 2 on her computer, and both got fucked up. The one I didn't open on her PC opens fine, and shows no sign of fuckedupness.

Trying to put the file in the fucked up usb drive and reopening it on her pc. So crazy it just might work.

[Sevilla]

I wouldn't mind giving it a go. It sounds like the co-workers computer may be infected or just a bad USB port that is slow to transfer from one point to another. This probably caused a bad dismount.

[orinthia]

The worst thing about ms office is that it writes to and modifies the file right when you open it, creates a temp file, and when you close without saving, reverts all changes (including modify times) and deletes the temp. If only it just made the temp and did nothing else to the original, it wouldn't be so retarded... And it's doubly bad when using a file off a live folder, like a google docs sync folder while it's active, the temp files and modifications are always uploaded and can have weird results sometimes. I'm imagining it's pretty bad doing this from a usb drive too because of the constant writes (most usb drives suck at writing small files).

That's probably why the unviewed file was fine but the other two were not. Since you've reformatted the usb drive a bunch, it probably won't be possible to recover the temp files that were created the moment they were opened, but could try. recuva is a free tool to try out, though I really doubt you'll get anything.

I'm not too sure what else could be done. Maybe try something to recover a busted zip file, http://www.diskinternals.com/zip-repair/ maybe. If it even works, have to hope the right pieces are still there for further fuckery.

[Alvinho]

Well, after much frustration, I decided to give up on the usb drive. It was small capacity and cheap, so fuck it.

I still have the corrupted files, but I'll probably just bite the bullet and go over this month's e-mails to have an approximate idea of my overtime hours. Should only be about 20,000 e-mails or so. =x

Thanks for all the replies.

[gibby]

As you have already implemented all the ways including open and repair function but still unable to repair Excel file. Give it a last try and refer to the solutions provided by Microsoft:
curah.microsoft.com/80505/fix-corruption-issues-in-microsoft-office-files

[Buffy]

Another option is Libreoffice (I find OpenOffice now a days to be too big a bloatware)

It may not work though, I wish you luck.

Not on topic, but seconding this to a certain degree. OpenOffice is a fucking RAM hog. It works great if you have a shit ton of RAM to open files with. But it is not anywhere near as well optimized as Microsoft Office. Having said all that, I still use OpenOffice because my machine does have a bunch of RAM and I'm used to using it from when I was too poor to afford a legit copy of Office.

[Elizara]

Buffy; LibreOffice is also free, is not a ram hog and does the job. I still can't afford a legit copy of office so that's what I use on my pc. It's basically a fork of OpenOffice, so it will read your openoffice files. I swapped to it when OpenOffice started opening crap when I started windows on my old pc (Ew, ram hog ram hog!) and never looked back.

If you'd like to try it, you can get it here.

[Kalmado]