MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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I have had trouble opening a couple of excel files from my memory stick today. The majority of the files on there work absolutely fine but these two are not opening.
I get a message saying ‘Excel found unreadable content in …….. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook’ so I click yes but all I get is a blank workbook with nothing in.
Searching for this on the net shows that it has something to do with pivot tables to a calendar or something like that. These excel docs only have some basic SUM formulae and hyperlinks and a couple of images (which are just in the workspace, not attached to anything). I have tried a different computer and I get the same thing.
Like I said, other files including excel ones are working fine on the computer, it just seems to be these two excel ones. If it was a couple of the others I wouldn’t be so bothered but one of them has been produced over the course of a couple of years or so, so I’d rather not have to start from scratch. Last time I accessed one was about a week ago.
Is there anything I can do to recover these properly or are they bu88ered?
They sound buggered. Maybe download OpenOffice and have a go at opening (a copy of) the files with that.
What I'd do:
Copy them again
Copy them onto the PC before opening them
Swear
They sound buggered. Maybe download OpenOffice and have a go at opening (a copy of) the files with that
Is OpenOffice less temperamental than Excel then?
What I'd do:Copy them again
Copy them onto the PC before opening them
Swear
hmm.... done a lot of swearing today over this matter.
<lecture> never, ever have files *only* on removable media, it can corrupt soon as look at you. Always have a backup. </lecture>
The short answer is that getting it back is going to be tricky. You might have autosaved versions (google "excel autosave") kicking about, and it might be worth sticking the USBkey back into the PC you last used to save the documents from just on the offchance that the cache sorts itself out.
OpenOffice is worth a try, not because it's inherently better or worse than MS Office, but because it's different, and with two packages you double your chances of reading it.
There's specialist recovery tools out there but TBH I've yet to come across one that isn't expensive, crap, or quite often both.
Bit of a punt but, you could try a scandisk on the drive?
thanks for the lecture cougar but i've already sworn to back-up at least once a week in future so this doesn't happen again.
i've looked at autosave files and tried openoffice and nothing in either.
i'll check later today on a couple of other computers that i've recently used to see if that sorts it out or not.
might get a new memory stick anyway as this one is about 5 years old now.
Have you already tried the 'open and repair' option ? I'm sure you have but as you've not mentioned it I thought I'd check . . . .
yes i've tried that without much luck. you're right I should have mentioned it.
my memory stick is failing to show any content now! the properties recognises that it's nearly full but doesn't show any objects when I view it in windows explorer.