Excel cannot open this file. The file might have been damaged or modified from it's original format.

[Jon Connell]

I've had this twice now with the same spreadsheet (quite a large one)
and Excel has now irrevocably lost data for me. I have a version in
backup, but all is lost for what recent data Excel 2008 has destroyed
in its mangling it seems. Older versions of Excel used to be able to
do data recovery, but I guess this is now impossible?

Before I go back to Office 2004 (which I intend to do), is there any
way to recover the data?

Oh ... and how does consumer law work in the US (where I bought the
software)? It's obviously not fit for purpose as UK consumer law would
understand it, but do I stand a chance of a refund?

Cheers,

Jon

[Bob Greenblatt]

On 5/8/08 2:43 PM, in article
456d9add-4f03-4c44...@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com, "Jon
Connell" <ciam...@googlemail.com> wrote:

All you have to do for a refund is to take it back to the retailer where you
bought it.

--
Bob Greenblatt [MVP], Macintosh
bobgreenblattATmsnDOTcom

[Alan]

On May 9, 2:43 am, Jon Connell <ciama...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I've had this twice now with the same spreadsheet (quite a large one)

> andExcelhas now irrevocably lost data for me. I have a version in
> backup, but all is lost for what recent data  Excel2008 has destroyed
> in its mangling it seems. Older versions ofExcelused to be able to

> do data recovery, but I guess this is now impossible?
>
> Before I go back to Office 2004 (which I intend to do), is there any
> way to recover the data?
>
> Oh ... and how does consumer law work in the US (where I bought the
> software)? It's obviously not fit for purpose as UK consumer law would
> understand it, but do I stand a chance of a refund?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jon

Hi,

There is a tool called Advanced Access Repair. I have used it to
repair many corrupt Access MDB files on my damaged disks successfully.
Its homepage is http://www.datanumen.com/aar/ Maybe you can have a
try.

Alan

[lanth...@officeformac.com]

Besides Alan's ever so not useful comment I don't see a resolution listed here.

I'm having the same issue with a spreadsheet I made in Excel 2008.

It's not large though.

What can I do to get my data out of the file?

[Pat McMillan]

I can't find the earlier posts to this thread. Can you please summarize your
scenario again? Did your file stop opening after running an updater or did
it stop opening after taking some action in Excel and saving? Is there any
chance you could send me the affected workbook? (patm...@microsoft.com)

Thanks,

Pat

On 5/28/08 9:24 AM, in article ee9a...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
"lanth...@officeformac.com" <lanth...@officeformac.com> wrote:

--
Pat McMillan
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corp.
This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.

[lanth...@officeformac.com]

I found a solution of sorts from this thread - <http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Excel/1539/0>.

making a copy, and changing the extension to .xml worked.

I then re-saved the file over the old one as an xlsx and it saved and reopened fine.

I think what triggered it was the "Conditional Sum" I have going (it's under Tools), as it's the only thing unique compared to my other docs.

Anyone else have any experience with conditional sum and issues?

[vickyq...@officeformac.com]

Hi,
I have an Excel spreadsheet with an attached pivot table and the file keeps crashing. The error message that I get is that "Excel has encountered a problem and needs to close". I re did the file on a new worksheet and that hasn't helped. I've changed the extension to xml and xlsx and that doesn't seem to help either. I just upgraded to Excel 2008 in hopes that, that might help and nothing. I need to work on my file and I don't know what to do.
Can anyone help me?

thank you,
vicky :frown:

[Pat McMillan]

Vicky and I talked about this offline. As it turns out, she was running
12.0.0 and we fixed the bug that was causing this in a subsequent update.

Thanks,

Pat

On 5/28/08 10:14 AM, in article ee9a...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
"vickyq...@officeformac.com" <vickyq...@officeformac.com> wrote:

--

[MRCL...@officeformac.com]

I just encountered this problem on my MacBook OS 10.5.3 in Excel 2008. The workbook is not that large. Pat, I'll send you the file.

[Pat McMillan]

Thanks so much. I'll check out the file you've sent and let you know what I
find.

Pat

On 5/28/08 7:36 PM, in article ee9a...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
"MRCL...@officeformac.com" <MRCL...@officeformac.com> wrote:

> I just encountered this problem on my MacBook OS 10.5.3 in Excel 2008. The
> workbook is not that large. Pat, I'll send you the file.

--

[jm...@officeformac.com]

Hi Pat,
I am having the same problem. Excel 2008 file (with a pivot table) crashed and refuses to open. Renaming the extension does not help. I just emailed you the file. I really appreciate any help you can give me in salvaging the data.

Thanks,
Jason

[MacJ...@officeformac.com]

Excel2008 with Leopard10.5.3
I lost my file too!
Data and bar plots. No "conditional" items, etc.
Only 140KB.
I had performed periodic saves.
Tried copy and renaming as suggested.
Nothing has worked.
Another file that was open as the time of crashing was recovered and is okay.
Whatever is good about 2008 is far overshadowed by it ruining a day's work.

[MacJ...@officeformac.com]

More on the problem.

Todays ruined file was updated from a previous version. I attempted to open that file( saved yesterday as xlsx). It also generates the error now!

The version of the file before that was in .xls format and it does open.
As an experiment, I made a copy of it and changed the extension to .xlsx. The same error is generated.

[MacJ...@officeformac.com]

A solution?

Opened on XP machine with Excel 2007. It gave an error message, but opened. Saved as xlsx. It opens okay with Excel 2008.

[Pat McMillan]

Hi,

Is there any chance you can send me a copy of the file (the corrupted
version that no longer opens in Mac Excel 2008)? It would help us track down
the issue.

Thanks,

Pat
patm...@microsoft.com

On 6/13/08 2:16 PM, in article ee9ae...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
"MacJ...@officeformac.com" <MacJ...@officeformac.com> wrote:

--

[Robotdude]

Hey this worked for me! Thank god. I believe the issue was that excel
crashed and opened the file via autosave. Once I went to save the file, I
chose save as and clicked on the original file. Once I did that I could no
longer open the file "which was password protected. I would put in the
password and then get the error we are talking about in this thread. I
copied the file, renamed it to .xml and it opened perfectly. Saved my ^$$

[Nolie...@officeformac.com]

I've just had the same problem.

I get the Excel cannot open this file the file may have been damaged or modified from its original format

I'm running:
- Mac OS X 10.5.4
- Excel 2008 for Mac 12.1.1

The file I'm having trouble with is a .xls, about 2.2MB file in size, has twelve good sized worksheets and a few graphs interspersed. It closed cleanly and now I get the error message.

Tried to save it as a .xml and .xlsx and re-open to no avail.

Help please!!

[de Biolley@discussions.microsoft.com Nicolas de Biolley]

I have a XLS file that works as a charm.
Open it, save it in "xlsx", and the problem EVERY single excel users in our
company encounters pops up (cannot open file blahblah).

So I can reproduce the problem, wich is the first way to a solution I
hope.... Because unfortunately, renaming it to xml doesn't work.

If you want this file, how can I attach it to this message? I'm no longer
using a usenet program, so posting via the microsoft website which doesn't
allow attach it seems.

[Fergal Condron]

Can you email the file to me at: fer...@microsoft.com

Thanks,
Fergal.

Fergal Condron,

Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft Corp.
This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.

On 8/8/08 8:36 AM, in article
550196FB-CEC7-4DC2...@microsoft.com, "Nicolas de Biolley"

[Wayne...@officeformac.com]

Hi MVPs,

After my wife spent 7 hours on an Excel file of our home budgets, full of Pivot Tables, last night, the aforementioned file -- now corrupted -- won't open in Excel at all.

At first, I thought this was happening because there are two versions of Excel on our G5 iMac (running Mac OS 10.4.11), and the file was having a hard time picking the most up-to-date version to open it. Solved that issue, but still couldn't open the file.

Tried NeoOffice, but the some of the file's contents vanished. Our old Windows laptop with MS Office, however, did open the file and it's now saved with another name we can read on the iMac.

Question: Is there a utility on the newest version of MS Office for the Mac that can fix previously usable, but now corrupted, Excel files? I'm not convinced that upgrading to a newer version will help in the future.

Thanks for any help and advice y'all can provide,

Wayne

[Unknown]

I managed to recover my file two ways:

1. I sent it to Patrick McMillan at Microsoft and he recovered it using a PC and he saved it to .xls
2. A buddy recovered it using iWork and exported it to .xls, this retained more of the formatting than the previous.

Many thanks to Pat, great support.

[Unknown]

Just like chime in that I too experienced the corruption issue and was able to recover it using the iWork import/export functionality.

The spreadsheet in question made heavy use of conditional sums but was otherwise fairly ordinary - no graphs, charts, enormous size, etc.

There was no prior crash/problem closing that would have been an obvious trigger for file corruption.

The file was saved in the .xlsx format.

I hope this issue is able to be identified quickly and resolved.

[Pat McMillan]

Thanks S.T. If you still have a copy of your file before it became corrupted
and could share it with me, I would love to investigate. Also, if you could
tell me that as best as you remember what steps you took with the file prior
to the last time you save it before it became corrupted it would be a great
help.

Thanks,

Pat
patm...@microsoft.com

On 9/11/08 8:40 AM, in article ee9ae...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw, "S.T.
Black" <> wrote:

--
Pat McMillan

[Luis]

I had the same issue described in this post, tried renaming the extension of
my file to xml and xsl but Excel still had problems opening the file.

I spent a long time putting the data together in that spreadsheet, and now
it's lost. Can anyone help me recover the data in the file please?

Thanks,

Luis

[Pat McMillan]

If you can send me a copy of the file I can investigate.

Thanks,

Pat McMillan
patm...@microsoft.com

On 10/11/08 3:32 PM, in article
9D33E336-421C-4F62...@microsoft.com, "Luis"
<Lu...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

--

[Luis]

Thanks for the follow-up! The trick of changing the file to .xml or .xsl
didn't work for me (I have a MacBook running office 2008.) I am lucky enough
to have Office for Windows too, and when I opened the file in Excel for
Windows the file corruption got fixed.

It would be nice to have that same functionality in Excel for Mac too.

Thanks again for the follow up!

Luis

[Pat McMillan]

Thanks. Yes, we're thinking seriously about file recovery for an upcoming
version of Mac Excel. I'll add your voice of support to the list.

Thanks,

Pat

On 10/13/08 6:27 PM, in article
569FE1C2-173D-426A...@microsoft.com, "Luis"

[Unknown]

So, there doesn't seem to be any quick fix it is there? I was working on a spread sheet yesterday, and now its have the same described error. Renaming it doesn't seem to have helped.

[Pat McMillan]

I'm working with Li to try to figure how how the file became corrupted.

On 10/23/08 6:34 AM, in article ee9ae...@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw, "Li"
<Li> wrote:

--

[stephe...@gmail.com]

Changing a copy to .xml worked for me(Only had two files on my desktop that were affected)--Thanks!

[aba...@uci.edu]

On Thursday, May 8, 2008 11:43:53 AM UTC-7, Jon Connell wrote:
> I've had this twice now with the same spreadsheet (quite a large one)
> and Excel has now irrevocably lost data for me. I have a version in
> backup, but all is lost for what recent data Excel 2008 has destroyed
> in its mangling it seems. Older versions of Excel used to be able to
> do data recovery, but I guess this is now impossible?
>
> Before I go back to Office 2004 (which I intend to do), is there any
> way to recover the data?
>
> Oh ... and how does consumer law work in the US (where I bought the
> software)? It's obviously not fit for purpose as UK consumer law would
> understand it, but do I stand a chance of a refund?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jon

Hi Jon,

I had this same problem, xcel crashed on me and It recovered my work but then i saved the recovered file over my preexisting one and then I got that error message. What I did to fix it was simply changed the (.xlsx) file extension to (.xls) and it opened right up. i then tried to change it back to (.xlsx) but it then gave me the error again so it looks like i have to just work in (.xls)

[leah.sc...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 12:33:42 PM UTC-4, lanth...@officeformac.com wrote:
> I found a solution of sorts from this thread - <http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/Excel/1539/0>.
>
> making a copy, and changing the extension to .xml worked.
>
> I then re-saved the file over the old one as an xlsx and it saved and reopened fine.
>
> I think what triggered it was the "Conditional Sum" I have going (it's under Tools), as it's the only thing unique compared to my other docs.
>
> Anyone else have any experience with conditional sum and issues?

Thank you for this! It worked :)

[gracer...@gmail.com]

Hi Pat
I have the same problem
This is very important work I need help
I've tried saving it in different forms xml xlsb ect nothing works
I've tried restarting
Can you please help

[gracer...@gmail.com]

Sent to you

[gracer...@gmail.com]

That email bounced back who can I send it too ?

[harriso...@gmail.com]

I'm about a decade late to this chat thread, but I too am getting this "... file might have been damaged or modified from its original format" message, and am now unable to access my spreadsheet. Are there still techs here that I can attach and email the file to in hopes of them saving it? I really don't know what was done that created the issue, but I am desperate to recover the file.