How Does An Excel File Get Corrupted? We Discussed Reasons and Fixes Here - Qiling  

How Does An Excel File Get Corrupted? We Discussed Reasons and Fixes Here


microsoft excel

The Microsoft Excel application is as popular, in fact imperative, as the Word. It has become one of the essential skills for college students and company workers. Since Excel has many powerful and intelligent data analysis functions like formulas and charts, it's good at dealing with massive data that needs arranging, filtering, calculating, etc.

Thus, an Excel workbook is regularly created with lots of time and effort! You must take good care of your Excel files on your computer, always turning on the autosave setting, making a backup, and monitoring computer health on a daily basis. Nobody wants to create a workbook that contains large amounts of processed data for a second time, only because the initial one gets corrupted! Will you be curious about how does an Excel file gets corrupted? What can you do to repair a corrupted Excel file?

Workable Solutions Step-by-step Troubleshooting
Fix 1. Use a Repair Tool Download, install and launch Stellar Toolkit for File Repair. Go to the software's home screen...Full steps
Fix 2. Use Open and Repair On the File tab, click Open > In Excel 2013 or Excel...Full steps
Fix 3. Change File Extension Open Microsoft Excel and click File > Click Export...Full steps
Fix 4. Restore Previous Version Right-click on the Excel file and select Properties...Full steps
Fix 5. Use External References Click File and go to Open > Right-click on the folder...Full steps

How Do You Tell If An Excel File Is Corrupted?

Every day, hundreds to thousands of users deal with corruption issues in Microsoft Office Suite, including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, but how do you determine the Excel file is truly corrupted? Usually, we can infer the corruption from the symptoms of opening a file and some specific error messages.

Symptoms representing a corrupted file in Excel:

Error messages reporting a corrupted file in Excel:

Common Reasons for Excel File Corruption

Why do Excel files get corrupted? There are plenty of reasons behind the Excel file corruption, and knowing some of the common reasons can help us trace the problem and find corresponding solutions to repair a corrupted Excel file.

How to Hopefully Repair A Corrupted Excel File 100%

A corrupt Excel file can result in a lot of wasted time and severe data loss. Nobody can keep calm after seeing their hard work going haywire. In spite of this, try your best to take a deep breath to minimize the damage the corruption did for you. Follow the below guide one by one to repair a corrupted Excel file on your Windows computer.

*The workarounds are applicable to all Excel versions from Excel 2003 to Excel 2019

QUICK TIP:As discussed, it is very likely that your Excel workbook could be malfunctioning due to a virus attack. So, it's important to run a deep system scan using antivirus software on your computer. Removing viruses or malware does not help you restore the corrupted file to normal, but it's necessary to avoid future corruption of all other files. In addition, try to check and repair hard drive bad sectors after all attempts of the following methods.

Method 1. Repair Corrupted Excel Files with a Repair Tool

The most effective way to repair a corrupt Excel file is using a professional file repair tool. Stellar Repair for Excel repairs severely corrupted XLS and XLSX files and retrieves everything from the Excel workbook without modifying its original format. Follow the steps below to repair Excel files now.

Step 1. Select the Excel Files

Download, install and launch Stellar Toolkit for File Repair. Go to the software's home screen and click "Repair Spreadsheet".

Select the Excel Files

Step 2. Repair the Excel Files

Browse to select the corrupt Excel files (XLS/XLSX). You can click on the Search option if you don't know its location. Once the file is selected, click "Repair". The software will initiate the scanning and repairing process.

Repair the Excel Files

Step 3. Preview and Save

Once the scan and repair process is over, the items will be displayed in a tree-view on the software's left-hand panel. Preview the items by double-clicking on them.

If the file preview is satisfactory, click the "Save File" button on the main menu. When prompted, choose the destination to save the salvaged file. Click "OK".

Preview and Save

Method 2. Use the Microsoft Open and Repair Tool

use open and repair tool to repair corrupted excel file

Next, do one of the following:

Method 3. Change File Extension to Open the Corrupted File

Chances are that the file extension of your seemingly corrupted Excel file is not compatible with the installed Excel edition/version on your computer. When the issue starts within the incompatibility, the file will not show content as normal. The common file extensions used are .xls and .xlsx, which earlier Excel 2003 saves the file with .xls by default while the later version after 2007 uses the .xlsx format. Try to change the file format of the corrupted file to see if the problem persists.

chagne file extension to repair corrupted excel file

Method 4. Restore Corrupted Excel File from The Previous Version

How many copies did you save on that file getting corrupted then? The workbook may have a regular copy in the Windows previous versions. Try to find a previous version that may not be identical to the corrupted one, but at least preserve most of the same data.

restore previous version to repair corrupted excel file

Method 5. Use External References to Link to The Corrupted Excel File

use external references to repair corrupted excel file

Do I Need Excel Recovery Tool for Corrupted Excel File Recovery?

Sometimes a file getting corrupted is more serious than a file getting deleted on a computer. Though there are several workarounds that can help fix the corruption and restore the file content, it's not fool-proof all the time, especially for some severely damaged files in Excel. 

There are specialized file repair programs online, with regard to the difficulty in restoring files that are broken or showing special character, the service cost is relatively high enough. In case your files are corrupted and cannot open in every way, you can consider the following Excel repair programs that enjoy a high reputation on the market.

By contrast, the data recovery program is usually cheaper than the repair one. Can Excel file recovery software work on corrupted file recovery? Not really. The data recovery software is for retrieving files that are lost, which can be deleted, emptied from recycle bin, or performing a quick format on a storage drive. The premise of using the data recovery software is that the file is lost and intact.

But there is a chance that many people use data recovery software to find lost Excel files, however, files won't open after recovery. It also suggests that the Excel file has been corrupted. In this case, among numerous data recovery tools on the web, Deep Data Recovery is the unique software that can repair a corrupted Excel file upon recovery.

When you lost a workbook in Excel, feel free to download the Qiling file recovery software on your PC, and run a deep scan on the drive to find the files. Since the software can repair the corruption automatically while you check for the scan results, it will fully recover a corrupted Excel file.

Step 1. Select file types that you want to recover

Launch Deep Data Recovery, because there will be a lot of scanned files, you can choose a file category for quick filtering, such as Pictures, Videos, Documents, Audio.

select scanned file types

Step 2. Then scan disk with corrupted documents. This software enables you to fix damaged Word, Excel, PPT, and PDF files in same steps.

select the disk with corrupted documents

Step 3. Qiling data recovery and repair tool will scan for all lost and corrupted files. You can find the target files by file type or type the file name in the search box. 

find corrupted documents

Step 4. Deep Data Recovery can repair your damaged documents automatically. After file preview, you can click "Recover" to save the repaired Word, Excel, and PDF document files to a safe location.location.

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