Gnumeric 1.0.12 crash while sorting, file corruption

[Jacob Smullyan]

Gnumeric 1.0.12 (on Gentoo Linux) just crashed, apparently while
sorting a table,
and the file is now unopenable -- Gnumeric puts up a little notice
saying that it is not an OLE file, "Sorry, the Management".

I'd be less piteous about this, except that it was my wife's file,
with several hours of work in it :-<.

I'm interested at the moment in trying to get the data out of this
file. Looking at it with hexdump shows that the file is not
completely scrambled; it seems to have a lot of real data in it. (It
was an .xls file.) But I know nothing about the .xls format. Does
anyone have any pointers about how I might be able to get real data
out of this file?

If anyone is interested in looking at the actual file -- it isn't
large -- I can send it off list. (It contains some address
information, so I'd rather not post it.)

Thanks,

Jacob Smullyan
"Hapless in New Jersey"

[Jody Goldberg]

On 2003-09-11, Jacob Smullyan <smul...@smullyan.org> wrote:
> Gnumeric 1.0.12 (on Gentoo Linux) just crashed, apparently while
> sorting a table,

Can you provide any other details ?
1.0.x has been very stable, so I'd appreciate being able to track
down why it crashed.

> and the file is now unopenable -- Gnumeric puts up a little notice
> saying that it is not an OLE file, "Sorry, the Management".

> I'm interested at the moment in trying to get the data out of this

> file. Looking at it with hexdump shows that the file is not
> completely scrambled; it seems to have a lot of real data in it. (It
> was an .xls file.) But I know nothing about the .xls format. Does
> anyone have any pointers about how I might be able to get real data
> out of this file?
>

Send it to me and I'll have a look, but I can't make any promises
that something will come out the other end.