Excel - corrupt spreadsheet 2

[laurasmith]

I have recently upgraded a machine from Windows 98 to XP and Office 2000 with the SP's and updates.

The user has tried to open an excel spreadsheet from off the network. The spreadsheet has no data in it however it is about quarter of a GB in size so there is data on it.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? User is not having any problems opening any other .xls or any other types of files.

Thanks

Laura

 

[ETID]

This might work for you...

faq68-1022

 

[ETID]

You can try to open it from within MSWord...yes Word.

Sometimes this works.


other than that....

there is software available on the web that will rescue a corrupt .xls

 

[KenWright]

Aaaahhhhhhh - That is soooooo dangerous. Admittedly given that it is toast anyway, it means it is not quite as bad, but I would never open an Excel file in Word. Many copies of Word have Autosave enabled, and if this kicks in whilst the file is open, your file is toast and unrecoverable.

Many a person has been caught unawares by that and lost data they couldn't afford to.

Just a note of caution

Regards
Ken................

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission

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[keepingbusy]

Hi Ken

Just searching through the forum for a similar problem. I notice you mentioned...

Aaaahhhhhhh - That is soooooo dangerous. Admittedly given that it is toast anyway, it means it is not quite as bad, but I would never open an Excel file in Word. Many copies of Word have Autosave enabled, and if this kicks in whilst the file is open, your file is toast and unrecoverable.

I considered this but copied the corrupt file and saved it as a different name first.

This method of opening the file in word worked perfectly. The only problem was putting the data back into excel. This however, turned out to be a simple process of copying and pasting each column back into a blank spreadsheet and then saving the XLS file.

I agree with you in some respects, but this was a great way of recovering an XLS file when all else had failed.

For other readers, I used Word & Excel 2003 for this process

Lee

Visual FoxPro Versions: 6 & 9
Operating System: Windows XP

http://www.customsoftware.co.uk

 

[KenWright]

I've yet to find a better way of recovering corrupt Excel files than the free suite OpenOffice, available from

http://www.openoffice.org

It will open corrupt Excel files that even Excel's file recovery option won't.

Regards
Ken.................

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission
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[keepingbusy]

Thanks Ken

Visual FoxPro Versions: 6 & 9
Operating System: Windows XP

http://www.customsoftware.co.uk

 

[AnotherHiggins]

I've yet to find a better way of recovering corrupt Excel files than the free suite OpenOffice

Agreed! I've had a lot of luck with OpenOffice. Since it's a free download, there is nothing to lose. I highly reccommend giving it a try if you run into a problem with one of your files.

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