Why do excel files become corrupt

Free Standard Professional Premium. Free Professional Premium. Written By Priyanka Chauhan. Approved By Alexis Llontop. Min Reading 5 Min. Summary: What to do when an Excel file is corrupted? This is a common question that is often asked by Microsoft Excel users. If you too are seeking an answer to this question, read the blog to learn about a few manual workarounds and a specialized Excel file repair tool to resolve the Excel file corruption issue.

The software can help you quickly retrieve contents from a damaged, corrupt, or inaccessible Excel file and restore the file to its original state. There even exist a few manual tips that can be used to recover data from damaged MS Office Excel files. Note: Before carrying out any of the repair and recovery workarounds, it is advised that you must save a backup copy of the damaged file. This is to prevent your files from turning completely inaccessible in case the methods fail to give desired results.

If MS Excel cannot repair a corrupted workbook automatically, you can try to do it manually. To do so, perform the following:.

Shadow copy is basically a snapshot backup copies of computer files or volumes. The snapshot may contain an older version of your Excel file that has become damaged now.

To find out, do the following:. You would have to repeat the process until you reach the point where the file became damaged. With this, you will get a baseline version of the file, but data may still have been lost. However, there could be other reasons besides corruption that may cause Excel to throw this error message.

Your Office suite, which Excel is a part of, may be having some primary issues in it causing problems while opening one Excel document. So, try opening another Excel file to check if the problem exists with all the files or just one. If other Excel documents work correctly, it means that only the particular document is corrupt.

On the contrary, if the issue is with your Office suite, repairing the current Office installation may help fix the issue. For this, perform these steps:. But sadly, you merely touch your claimed subject. Your subject isn't about the rescue options of corrupted Excel files. That's addressed in other articles of you already. So that may mean the various executables belonging to the MS Excel application.

It obviously doesn't mean spreadsheet files as these are not proprietary. They conform to published standards, industry standards and other international standards. Any spreadsheet may process them without needed an Excel license by Microsoft. I use LibreOffice Calc for that purpose at home. When working at SME, I also use the same application. Only at larger corporations, I'll have to use MS Excel. Long time ago in history, Microsoft Excel used proprietary data formats for its spreadsheet.

But these times are long gone. More than 15 years ago, Microsoft decided to publish its data formats for its spreadsheet files and to make these international standards in order to get better cards in antitrust investigations in various countries as well as for getting rid of its disadvantages in public tenders where competitors could proof that their offers support international standards.

In your two year old article you refer correctly to xls and xlxs files for data storage of spreadsheets. So you obviously know better. I understand your claim. But do you know there are some specific error categories that help you in easy identification of Excel file corruption?

In this post, I will tell you how to identify Excel file corruption or what Excel errors occur due to corruption. It will also help you to apply the right solution as per the Excel error you get. Before moving towards the list of Excel errors that occur due to corruption , please check one more important section of this post, why do Excel files get corrupted?

Well, there are plenty of reasons behind the Excel file corruption ; some of them are given below. Have a look:. Well, these are some of the common reasons for Excel file corruption which later start showing error messages. Here I have listed down some very commonly encountered Excel errors that occur due to corruption along with its fixes.

These errors listing will help to verify Excel file corruption. This is a common Excel error message faced by users when Excel gets corrupted. This is a random error faced by the users and this is commonly seen in the Excel and versions. However, this is not only limited to these versions but also reported by other Excel users as well. Well, this is very frustrating as after getting the error message user was unable to open or even access the Excel file.

Your workbook may be partially or entirely recovered, based on your AutoRecover settings, assuming it has been enabled. We have witnessed client workbooks crashing randomly. Needless to say, that NOT all Excel workbooks crash due to file corruption. Some could crash due to Excel bugs in combination with VBA code that doesn't follow best development practices.

Improper use of codenames in VBA can also crash Excel. In addition, workbooks may crash, if your Office version has not been patched properly. Corruption Hint: Excel crashes after reporting that a project or library cannot be found. However, there are no missing library references or VBA projects! A workbook template, which was created in Excel and was later converted to As such, it contained no data.

The degree of error appears to vary from file to file: The MS recover process will try to correct the file a certain number of times. So just taking the template you have, and workbooks created from that template, I have some that will go through the recovery process 6 times and then finally open and others that will do 15 'recovers' and then give up.

Some will show errors on sheets that no longer exist In addition, data would have to be transferred from several populated workbooks to the new template. We were able to repair the workbook in Excel using VBA code alone!

Gary promptly confirmed our results by repairing numerous workbooks in both U. Unfortunately, all software tested failed to restore Gary's template to a working state and couldn't recover any data or formulas.