Few Easy Tips & Tricks to Repair Excel File Manually

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Repair Excel File Manually Few Easy Tips & Tricks

Naitik Semwaal

9/12/2016

Corruption can cause severe problems for Microsoft

Excel users which include data inaccessibility and data

loss. An excel spreadsheet is prone to corruption due to

numerous reasons. You can’t open your spreadsheet if it’s

in invalid state or corrupt. Luckily, there are some useful

tips & tricks to repair excel file. All these tricks I’m going

to share here in this blog post are performed manually,

i.e. without using any third-party paid tool.

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Microsoft Excel

Microsoft has designed an electronic spreadsheet application, known as Microsoft

Excel, available in Microsoft Office suite. It also comes as a separate application.

The Excel tool allows users to create tables in spreadsheets in which a large

amount of data and information can be stored, organized as well as manipulated.

Generally, a spreadsheet file represents the tables in which data and information

are stored in multiple rows and columns. All the rows and columns of a table in a

spreadsheet can be easily manipulated by using basic and complex arithmetic

operations and functions. Other than this standard feature, it also supports

programming feature via Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

Microsoft Excel is commonly used for individual as well as business or

organizational purpose. As an individual, we use Excel for record keeping and

storing contacts (now it’s an old trend to store contacts in excel spreadsheets). But

in businesses and organizations, Excel tool is mainly used for business analysis

which includes data analysis as it has financial and statistical functions, data

storage in a systematic way, creation of charts for business presentation, creation

of invoices, timesheet, trackers, etc.

XLSX is the new file extension used for Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to store data

and information. In Excel 2003 or earlier versions, XLS was/is used. In Excel 2007

and its later versions, the XLSX format is used. Due to its backward compatibility

feature, it can also be opened in the earlier versions of MS Excel via Open XML

component support. An XLSX file contains rows (arranged in a grid of rows and

columns), charts, mathematical functions, styles and formatting.



Excel File Corruption

As no computer file is immune to corruption, so is the Excel spreadsheet.

Sometimes you may receive an error message reporting corruption while working

on an excel spreadsheet. There are many reasons which can cause corruption in

excel spreadsheets, such as: virus attack or bugs infection, unexpected system

shutdown, software malfunction, storage media failure and many more.

Let me show you below the most common error messages which are encountered

on your screen at the time of excel file corruption:

“Excel can’t open the file abc.xlsx because the file format or file extension is

not valid.”

“The file is corrupt and can’t be opened.”

“File error: Data may have been lost.”

“Excel found unreadable content in filename.xlsx.”

“Unable to read file.”

Have you ever received any of these error messages before? Do you remember

how you resolved the error? Receiving error messages simply means the excel file

is corrupt. If you don’t do anything in time, you may lose your crucial data and

information forever. There are few highly useful tips & tricks which effectively

work with your corrupt excel file. You can try them before purchasing any paid

solution to repair Excel file.



Useful Tips & Tricks to Repair Excel File

Method #1: Open and Repair

One of the easiest and quickest ways to fix corruption from XLSX file is Open and

Repair. It’s a manual repair technique in MS Excel to repair excel file and make it

accessible. The required steps are given below:

Step 1: Launch Microsoft Excel in your system.



Step 2: Click the File tab on main menu > Open. Or press Ctrl + O.

Step 3: Locate the corrupt excel file and select it.



Click the drop-down arrow shown beside the Open button. Click Open and

Repair… in the option.

Step 4: Before Excel can attempt to repair the file and open it, you need to select

the action:

Click Repair to recover as much as possible data. Also, you can click Extract

Data if Excel was previously unable to repair the workbook.

Step 5: Within a few seconds, the file will be repaired.

Now click Close to exit.

This trick will hardly take few seconds to repair Excel file, and the file will be

opened without having any issue. But in case of severe corruption, this trick may

not work or fail to repair Excel file. If the excel file contains a very crucial chart,

but you can’t open the file due to corruption, you can try a manual solution to

extract the source data of the chart. If you don’t know how to perform data

extraction, you can try the method shown below.



Method #2: Data Extraction

By using a macro, you can easily extract data of the chart from a corrupted

spreadsheet. Follow the steps shown below:

Step 1: In a module sheet, you need to enter the following macro code:

Step 2: Now insert a new worksheet in your workbook and rename it ChartData.

Step 3: This time you need to select the chart from which you want to extract the

underlying data values.

Step 4: Now run the GetChartValues97 macro.



Method #3: Using SYLK (symbolic) format

There is one more manual solution to repair excel file. You can convert your

corrupted excel file into SYLK or symbolic link format to recover data from it.

This solution is highly recommended by Microsoft to filter out the corrupted

elements from the Excel workbook. This solution is very helpful if the corruption

is related to printer fault or occurred due to printing problem. Follow the steps

given below:

Step 1: Open Microsoft Excel on your system.

Step 2: Click the File tab on main menu > Save As.

Step 3: Click on the arrow shown next to Save as type box.

Step 4: Select SYLK (Symbolic Link) (*.slk) in the list.

Step 5: Type a new name for this active worksheet and click Save button.

Important note

If the workbook contains only one sheet, you have no need to give a new name for

it, i.e. the above step is unnecessary.

You will receive a message shown below. As you want to save only the active

sheet, you need to click OK.

Again you will receive a new message shown below. Click Yes.



Now follow the steps given below:

Step 1: Click the File tab on main menu, and click Exit.

Step 2: If you receive a message asking you to save the changes that you made,

click Yes.

Step 3: Now open Microsoft Excel on your system.

Step 4: Click the File tab on main menu > Open. Or press Ctrl + O button.

Step 5: Now locate the “Filename.slk” file which you have saved earlier and

select it. Click Open button.

Step 6: The selected file will be opened. To see the .slk file, you may need to click

All Files or SYLK Files in the Files of type list.

Step 7: Again click the File tab > Save As.

Step 8: In the Save as type box, select Excel Workbook.

Step 9: In the File name box, type a new name for the workbook to create a copy

without replacing the original workbook. Then click Save.

Important note

The SYLK (Symbolic Link) format saves only the active worksheet in the

workbook. Make sure you open the corrupted workbook repeatedly and save each

worksheet separately.

Other Ways to Open Corrupt Excel Files

You may also try to open a corrupted excel file in other programs, like: WordPad,

Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Calc. If the corrupted excel file is opened in

MS Word or WordPad, you can restore your important data excluding the

formulas. MS Word or WordPad can convert an excel file data into text which can

be easily recovered. Or, you can try to open the file in OpenOffice Calc. It can

open corrupted XLSX files if possible.



Professional Solution to Repair Excel File

If all these solutions fail to repair excel file, you can try an advanced recovery tool

to repair excel file. I would recommend Excel Recovery software here,

programmed for handling major corruption issues which can’t be fixed with the

manual tips & tricks. The software successfully fixes corruption and recovers all

standard cells’ properties and other crucial data items, such as: graphs, tables,

Unicode character, formulae, images, text formatting, notes and many more. To

know more about this software, please visit SysInfoTools Software’s official

website and download the free demo version of this software.

http://www.sysinfotools.com/recovery/excel-recovery.php

Few Easy Tips & Tricks to Repair Excel File Manually

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