How to Recover Excel Files
If you use Excel regularly, at some point, you might find yourself with a corrupt spreadsheet. This is especially frustrating because Excel stores so much data. The loss of a single spreadsheet can be catastrophic.
However, there is hope and you can often recover Excel files. If you have Microsoft Excel 2002 or above, you'll be pleased to learn that a built-in recovery utility will help you recover Excel spreadsheets. This utility is designed to automatically detect corruption and repair the file upon opening. If Excel detects corruption and the repair fails, it will try opening the file again. On the second attempt, it skips the repair and extracts cell values and formulas from the sheet. You will lose formatting and some other features but you will have your data back.
Sometimes, you will need to recover Excel files manually. To do this, go to File, choose Open, find the corrupt Excel file, and instead of clicking Open as normal, click the arrow next to Open. Choose the Open and Repair option. Pick either Repair or Extract.
Disk errors and network errors occasionally make it difficult to open files. If you can't open an Excel file, you may be able to recover Excel data simply by moving the file to a new location.
Another way to recover Excel is by reverting to a previously saved version of your workbook. To do this, your worksheet must be open. While open, go to File, Open, and choose the same worksheet. Excel will detect that the worksheet is already open and will ask you if you would like to discard any new changes and reopen the document.
If you have a single worksheet workbook, you can save it as an SYLK document. This format is usually used for removing printer corruption and often works when you want to recover Excel corruption too. Simply open the document, go to File and choose Save as. Find SYLK in the list and click OK when prompted. You can also do this for multiple sheets but you must do this procedure for each sheet in the workbook. To reopen the file, you will need to click All Files in the File Type list.
Another trick to recover Excel files works in much the same way as the SYLK. This time, you can save the entire workbook as HTML. Open the document. Choose File, Save As, and click Web Page. Close the file and then reopen the HTML version in Excel. Now, resave it as an Excel worksheet. Now, you have a brand new file with your data! You may lose formatting but at least you have your basic information.
If you can't open the corrupt Excel file in Excel, try opening it in Excel viewer, MS Word, or WordPad. You may need to install converters or download the free viewer from Microsoft. If you can open the file in one of these programs, you can copy and paste your data into a new spreadsheet. While this method lets you recover Excel data, it doesn't allow you to recover dialog sheets, module sheets, embedded charts, macro sheets, and cell formulas.
