Microsoft Excel is a renowned application which is used to store financial reports, statistical analysis tables, business and personal records. Like other programs, data stored in an Excel file is not completely safe. To elaborate, an Excel veteran must have encountered a corrupt Excel file, which worked fine one day, and then would not open the next time. To overcome this problem, Excel 2002 was introduced with Document Recovery task pane. If Microsoft Excel encounters a problem and stops responding, you can close the program in a controlled manner. The Excel file you were working on is analyzed for errors, and information in it is recovered if possible. This Excel repair feature gives you the opportunity to cope up a data disaster. But, in case of severely damaged Excel files, you have to rely on other repair workarounds including third-party software.
Consider a scenario, wherein, you receive the following error when you try to open an Excel 2002 workbook pertaining to your employees’ personal information:
“Unable to read file.”
After you click OK button, the Document Recovery task pane does not appear, and the workbook is not recovered.
Cause
This happens when the Excel file contains damage to different portions of the file structure. In the above scenario, MS Excel 2002 detects the first signs of damage and tries to repair the file by starting Excel in safe mode. After doing this, Excel 2002 observes the remaining damages in the file, and then attempts to restart it in a minimal-load mode.
When this second attempt to restart Excel fails, the above error occurs. The behavior also points towards severe corruption in an Excel file.
Resolution
You can resolve the problem by following the below-mentioned Excel recovery steps:
- You must download the latest service pack i.e. SP 3 for Microsoft XP
- Alternatively, you must try the following methods to recover data from an Excel file
- Set the recalculation option in Excel to manual
- Open the file in Microsoft Word or WordPad
- Open the file in Microsoft Excel Viewer
- If a chart is linked to the corrupted file, use a macro to extract the data
- If the above steps do not yield any result, then immediately opt for a professional Excel repair software.
Stellar Phoenix Excel Repair is a reliable utility which repairs corrupt or damaged Excel spreadsheets created with MS Excel 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000 versions. The Excel file repair utility also preserves the formatting whilst restoring all the components of a corrupt Excel file.
