Corrupted Excel file

[forrestgrump]

Kinda car related for PH, I have a small Excel file where I keep track of all the money I spend on my BMW i.e. servicing costs and such. Tried to open it the other day and it's totally blank. It's still the same size file as it was before, and I'm not going through a shortcut. I don't have any system restore points (PC) and I've tried a couple of things Google suggests like updating Open Office and nada.

It's more 'mild inconvenience' than outright disaster so I don't exactly wanna go to a professional to restore 20 rows of car expenditure. If anyone has any ideas or willing to have a bash at it for some beer tokens let me know.

Thanks.

[Jakg]

XLS or XLSX?

Microsoft Excel (vs Open Office, that is) is pretty good at repairing corrupted spreadsheets.

Post it up and I'm sure someone will have a go...

[Cliftonite]

Smart-arse solution: use instead one of the two back-up files you (should) have made.

[DaveH23]

Make a copy and change extension to CSV then open in Notepad. If it works copy the content to a new excel file.

Worth a try.

[maffski]

DaveH23 said:

Make a copy and change extension to CSV then open in Notepad...

If it's xlsx then change the copy to .zip and decompress it, xlsx & docx are XML zipped up

[nyt]

Work on copies of the spreadsheet

Try opening in another version of Excel.

Try opening using the Excel Mobile app

Try opening in Google Apps

The hope is that a related application wont be so worried by the particular corruption in your file.

You can also try Open/Repair: https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/simple-way-to-ope...

[forrestgrump]

Cliftonite said:

Smart-arse solution: use instead one of the two back-up files you (should) have made.

Always one

I open my laptop about once a month and don't work on or with computers anymore, so for a relatively young man I'm beyond illiterate on them. If anyone can have a bash the file can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e38abqgga3to7cu/Car-expe...

[nyt]

forrestgrump said:

If anyone can have a bash the file can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e38abqgga3to7cu/Car-expe...

Took a quick look - no data at all in that file I'm afraid. All zeroes.

[CorradoTDI]

Yep, nothing in that .ods file to recover but it's possibly it's on your laptop still somewhere so maybe take a look and upload anything else you find?

Worth doing a search for the file name and also looking in recent doc's in case the path changed etc.

Also don't rule out that fact that you might have some sort of virus / malware wiping data on your machine so run a scan making sure everything is up to date.

[snuffy]

nyt said:

forrestgrump said:

If anyone can have a bash the file can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e38abqgga3to7cu/Car-expe...

Took a quick look - no data at all in that file I'm afraid. All zeroes.

Yep. I've just used on a online hex editor and every byte is a zero - I never knew BMWs were so cheap to run !!

[forrestgrump]

Thanks for having a look fellas. Nothing else on the PC, she's a goner.

I'll be going back to pen and paper I think.