How to Recover a Corrupt Excel File

An Excel workbook is prone to corruption, just like other MS Office files. Corruption can occur in an Excel file due to many reasons including application errors, failed network connections, unexpected computer shutdown etc. To battle the corruption problem, users strongly believe in maintaining backups. Backup copies, however, won't always contain the updated information, and you have to re-enter the data and required content. In order to avoid such nagging problems, it is better to consider repairing an affected Excel workbook. Microsoft provides various methods to help you perform Excel repair on your own .See the tips section for them. You may want to try them first, or a combination with the list below.

Step:

1. Close down Excel, re-open it and try to open the file again.

2. If this doesn't work, restart the computer, open up Excel and try to open the file again

3. If this doesn't work, delete the contents of your c:\windows\temp directory then reboot. Try again.

4. If this doesn't work, restart the computer, open up Excel and try to open the file again

• Click on Start then Run then enter (including the quotes and the /s extension): "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\excel.exe" /s ("C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\excel.exe" /s (for Excel 2002, Office XP, click cancel if the MS Office Installer starts, Excel in safe mode will still start)
• Try to open the file.

5. If this doesn't work, be sure to scan the file for viruses. Make sure your macro heuristics scanning option is turned on. Ask your IT administrator how to do this.

6. If you don't find a virus, find the file in Explorer, right click on it and rename it, replacing the .xls extension with the .doc extension. Try to open it as Word document.

7. If this doesn't work, try to determine if the file is unrecoverable on the disk. Open the file in Explorer and try to copy it to another location.

• If you can copy the file to another location, If not, then the actual sectors on the disk may be corrupted
• If the data is valuable enough to you, seek professional services as a damaged hard disk file recovery is not for the faint at heart.

8. Try to open any damaged disk recovered file immediately, miracles do happen.

9. If the recovered file won't open or you could copy the file to another location, try to open the file in a more recent version of Excel. As the version numbers increase, their ability to recover corrupt files increases. If this doesn't work or such a version of Excel is not available, see if some other spreadsheet application is and try to open the file in that program.

If the above-suggested methods do not help you in repairing a corrupt Excel workbook, then you should not lose hope. Using one of the professional Excel repair tools, you can repair a damaged workbook without putting in too much efforts . you should download Stellar Phoenix Excel Recovery without any qualms. The application repairs corrupt workbooks, created with MS Excel 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000 versions. Incorporating simple GUI, this repair Excel file utility scores much higher than other recovery applications in terms of performance and user-friendliness.