How to Recover Data from Corrupt Excel File?
Summary: Has your Excel file gone corrupt and you cannot find a solution to fix it? Don’t worry! In this blog, we have provided you with some of the best ways to recover data from corrupt Excel files.
Excel files are of utmost importance for any business for organizing data or doing complex calculations. Imagine spending hours creating a spreadsheet for your business and suddenly it gets corrupted. In that case, you are on verge of losing all of its data with minimal hope of recovering it.
“I created an Excel file consisting of connections to another file, pivot tables, and other data that abruptly got corrupted. I can’t work with it anymore. To solve this, I tried downgrading the version and making the edits but couldn’t succeed. I tried creating an entire new XLSX file but that did not help either. How can I overcome this problem?”
After analyzing this query, you must have realized that users must keep backups for such rainy days than repair damaged Excel file. Repairing and recovering such files can be tough but we have researched and mentioned the best methods that you can adopt to fix the errors.
Causes of Corrupted Excel File
One of the most common problems with Excel files is file corruption. Even if you are very loyal to backing up your spreadsheets after every job, corruption is still a huge problem. Even the slightest mistake can ruin hours of hard work. Not being able to access an Excel spreadsheet can be very annoying as sometimes the corrupted file cannot be accessed no matter what you do.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common causes of Excel file corruption
- Sudden blackout
- Error processing spreadsheet
- Extra large file size
- Do not close the Excel application while shutting down the system.
- Bad sectors on the computer hard drive
- Virus
Manual Method to Recover Data from Corrupt Excel File
When Excel identifies any form of corruption in files, it automatically starts its file recovery mode. However, this method is limited to minor damage only and does not work with severely corrupted files. Other than this, you can try the following methods to recover your data:
- Go back to the previously saved version of the workbook.
- Extract the data from a corrupted file by using a macro.
- Try setting up the calculation option to manual.
Users can try these strategies to overcome the error but as already stated, these do not work with heavily destructed files. In such cases, you can go for an automated solution to repair corrupted Excel files.
Automatic Solution to Repair Damaged Excel File
After having done deep research, we highly Recommend Software. This tool is trusted by thousands all across the world to easily repair XLS and XLSX files.
This application only focuses on recovering Excel workbook data from corrupted Excel files rather than modifying the contents. This utility will not change the layout, formatting, hyperlinks, formulas, worksheet structure or anything else after the repair process. The user gets the same original content in the resulting file saved in the corrupted file.
Some Features of the Software:
- Auto-detects the corrupt files.
- Option to repair multiple files at once.
- Capable of recovering files protected by passwords.
- Retrieves workbooks consisting of multiple worksheets.
- Download the software for free to deal with corrupt files, protected, virus-infected, inaccessible files, and other such problems.
Related Article: Unable To Open Excel File
Quick Steps to Recover Data from Corrupt Excel File
- Download and Install the software.
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Now, Browse the file or folder that you need to recover. The software will then analyze and repair these files.
- After loading the files, the software will provide you with a preview of the data it contains.
- You can now save the repaired file(s).
Done! You can repair damaged Excel files using a couple of steps. This application supports Excel 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010, and 2007.
Conclusion
In this write-up, we mentioned ample ways to help you recover data from corrupt Excel files. Both of the file formats i.e., XLS and XLSX can be fixed with this tool. You can try the manual practices however, they do not work well with bigger files. The manual method also poses a threat to damage the already corrupt file to such an extent that you can never recover it and hence will lose the data forever. We hope that you successfully recover the data with no loss of data.
