Solutions for 'Excel found unreadable content in Book_Name'

A pivot table is the most efficient feature of Microsoft Excel 2007. It helps you summarize a table's data by its different fields. You can create the table by defining which fields to view and how the data should be displayed. Based on your selection, Excel organizes the data and enables you to get a different view of the data. Though at times, you may encounter various errors while trying to open an Excel workbook with pivot tables. A pivot table using key performance indicators (KPIs) or a corrupt workbook could be the reasons among others behind error messages. In order to access the stored data in a workbook, you should adopt corrective measures or use a backup. If nothing seems working, you can go for an advanced excel repair utility.

Consider a scenario, wherein, you try and open a Microsoft Excel 2007 workbook and receive the following error:

“Excel found unreadable content in Book_Name. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook.”

When you click 'Yes', you come across the following Excel recovery report:

“Removed Records: PivotTable report from /xl/pivotCache/pivotCacheDefinition1.xml part (PivotTable cache)”

And, if you open the same Excel workbook in the Microsoft SharePoint Web Part report page, you may receive the following error message:

“The workbook that you selected cannot be opened. The workbook may be in an unsupported file format, or it may be corrupt. Would you like to try and open this file in Excel?”

Cause

The above error could have surfaced due to corruption (a cause itself stated in the above error message). But, there could be other reasons which are listed below:

• If the Pivot Table uses key performance indicators (KPIs)
• The KPIs are created in the Analysis Services Business Intelligence Development Studio
• On or more of the KPIs have an expression in the Current Time Member property

Resolution

If one or more KPIs have an expression in the Current Time Member property, then you can combat the problem by removing the expressions from all Current Time Member properties.

In case, you still encounter an error, it suggests that your Excel file is corrupt. To fix corruption, you need to seek help from an repair excel file software. Such third-party tools apply improved scanning algorithms to extract data from corrupt Excel workbooks in an effortless way. You can easily download an Excel repair utility from the Internet.