How to recover Data from Damaged Workbooks in Excel

Microsoft has designed an electronic spreadsheet program known as MS Excel that is available in MS Office Suite. The Excel tool permit users to make spreadsheet, in which you can arrange, manipulate and store your important data.

This application is used in businesses, organization as well as individual purpose. In businesses and organization it is mainly used for business analysis which involve – data analysis as it has financial and statistical function, charts creation for businesses presentation, data storage in systematic way, timesheet, etc while as an individual it is used for record-keeping. 

XLSX is the latest file extension for Ms Excel spreadsheet to store the data. It is latest format of MS Excel, which is supported by MS Excel 2007 and 2013. An XLSX file contains rows (organized in a grid of rows and columns), charts, styles, mathematical function and formatting.

In some cases an Excel spreadsheet does not opened and it becomes inaccessible. It happens due to corruption in Excel files. Unfortunately, XLSX files are prone to corruption. There are various reasons which can cause corruption in Excel spreadsheets, which involve – sudden system shutdown, program malfunction, virus infection, storage media failure or corruption, etc.  

Below is the list of the error messages that you may receive when your excel file gets damaged:

• “Unable to read file.” 
• “The file is corrupt and cannot be opened.” 
• “Excel cannot open the file abc.xlsx because the file format or file extension is not valid.” 
•  “File error: Data may have been lost.” 
• “Excel found unreadable content in filename.xlsx.” 

You might have faced or received any of the errors in your past, if your file gets damaged or corrupted. This is one of the irritating scenarios as you may lose all your important data, which is stored in Excel sheet.

How to fix damaged Excel workbook:

One of the quickest and easiest ways to repair damaged XLSX file is “Open and Repair”. It is the common and manual method to repair corrupted Excel file and thereafter make them accessible. Follow the steps below:

1. Open MS Excel in your system.
2. Click on File tab > Open. Or press Ctrl+O.
3. Search the corrupted XLSX file and select it.
4. Click on the arrow shown beside the Open button.
5. Click on Open and Repair from the list.

If the above manual method fails to repair and recover your Excel spreadsheet, then it is recommended that you can take help of MS Excel file Repair tool. It can recover all the original structure and properties such as text, tables, graphs, character, formulae, images, notes and everything.

Also read: ‘File error: data may have been lost’ Excel File Error