Excel is probably just as important to most workers as wearing clothes and eating food. I pretty much use Excel on a daily basis to do everything from managing finances to analyzing customer data. It’s so powerful, it’s hard to imagine life without Excel. And that’s exactly why it can be so terrible when you end up with a damaged or corrupt Excel file! All of that work and it might be lost forever, unless you were smart enough to make a backup. Luckily, most corrupted Excel files can be recovered, you just have to try out a lot of different ways.
If your Excel file is corrupted, below are some ways you can hopefully repair the file or at least get some of the data back. Method 1 – Run Repair The first thing to try is to open it with the Repair option in Excel. You can do this by clicking on File and then Open. In the Open dialog box, single click on the Excel file and then click on the small arrow next to the Open button.
Replacing file path in excel with another. Under the 'Data' Tab, click 'Edit Links' - this should show you the files you have linked to, and you can 'Change Source' to update it. Alternatively, you could do a simple Find/Replace (CTRL+F, then click 'replace' and type the path you need to replace and then in the replace area, put the new. Change Default Save Location for Microsoft Office and Ladibug Software (Mac) By default, Microsoft Office files, such as Word, Powerpoint and Excel, save to the Documents folder on your computer.The Ladibug document camera software also saves, by default, all screen captures to the Documents folder.
Go ahead and click on Open and Repair and you’ll get a message asking if you want to repair, which will recover as much data as possible or if you simply want to extract data, which will copy out the formulas and values. You can try to repair first and see if it can recover the whole file, if not, you can then try to extract the data. Method 2 – Save File To Different Format If you are able to open the file in Excel, you can try to save the file out into different formats and then re-open them in Excel and try to save them back as Excel workbooks. Click on File and then Save As.
![How To Change The Location Of A Linked File On Excel 2008 For Mac How To Change The Location Of A Linked File On Excel 2008 For Mac](http://adod.idrc.ocad.ca/sites/adod.idrc.ocad.ca/files/Excel2008forMac_2.png)
Choose SYLK (Symbolic Link) from the Save as type list and click Save. Then close the workbook. Next, click File and Open again, but this time choose the SYLK file. You may have to choose All Files from the Files of type list to see the SYLK file. Once the file is open, click File and then Save As. Now you will choose Microsoft Excel Workbook and click Save.
Note that saving using the SYLK format only saves the active worksheet. You will have to save each worksheet individually and repeat this procedure. Along with the SLYK format, you can also save the file out using the HTML format. Once saved out, re-open it and try to save it as an Excel workbook. With the HTML format, you don’t need to save each worksheet individually. Method 3 – Change Recalculation Option If you can’t open the file at all, you can try a couple of more things. Firstly, try setting the recalculation option in Excel to manual.
You can do this by going to Tools, Options and clicking on the Calculation tab. In the Calculation section, go ahead and choose Manual. If you are using Excel 2007 or higher, the procedure is different. You have to click on the Office button at the top left, then choose Excel Options. Click on Formulas and then click on Manual under the Calculation options section.
Now try to open the corrupted Excel file and see if it opens. If not, keep reading! Method 4 – Open in Word or WordPad You can also try opening the damaged Excel file in Microsoft Word or WordPad. In order to do so, you first have to make sure you have the Microsoft Excel Converter installed. You can download it from the Microsoft website. Even though you might be able to open the files, you will lost chart sheets, dialog sheets, macro sheets, and you will lose all cell formulas. However, you should be able to view the data.
If you have macros, try opening the file in WordPad as the Visual Basic code in your modules might show up. You will have to perform a search for “Function” or “Sub”.
Method 5 – Link to Corrupted File In Excel, you can link to other Excel workbooks from within a worksheet. You can try to use this method to extract data from a corrupted Excel workbook.
Click File then Open and navigate to the folder that contains the corrupted file. Then click Cancel. Now go ahead and click File and then New and click OK. In cell A1, type =FileName!A1 and press Enter. If everything goes well, you should see the data from cell A1 of the corrupt worksheet appear in cell A1 of your new workbook. If so, now you can simply drag the corner of the box and expand the selection out to however many rows and columns existed in the corrupt workbook. Method 6 – Use Excel Viewer You can also try to download Microsoft Excel Viewer, which may be able to open the file for you.
All it lets you do is copy the cells and paste them into a new workbook, but it’s better than nothing. Method 7 – Use Later Excel Versions If the corrupted Excel file was created in Excel XP, Excel 2003, etc, try opening it in a later version like Excel 2007 or Excel 2010. As the versions increase, the ability for the program to recover a file increases also, so you might get lucky and be able to recover your file. Method 8 – Delete Temp Folder At this point we’re hoping and praying, but it’s worth a shot.
You can delete the contents of the C: Windows Temp directory and then restart your computer. Try opening the file again. If you still can’t open your Excel file, post a comment here and I’ll try to help!
Why is this so confusing? It isn’t but it is quite convoluded on how to get this done. I had to do this because the connections to my SQL Express database had to have the port name in the connection. So on my local machine, I could open up the MS Access file with tables linked to the computer named CDC-EBLEY2-7 SQLEXPRESS, but if you were to open the file from someone else’s computer, an Connection failed: SQL State: ‘01000’ SQL Server Error 67 SQL Server Error: 17 (blah blah blah) resulted. Because I enabled my server to be connected to via TCP/IP over port 1433 – which are the defaults, but it has to be explicitly set in the connection string of every table. What I needed was to connect to CDC-EBLEY2-7,1433 SQLEXPRESS so others could open the MS Access file and NOT get errors. This is strange, because 1433 is the default port any way – but it works.
Each one of my tables is not through an ODBC setup but each table has it’s own string which needs to be updated Lets get some info first. Open notepad and get ready to copy the DESCRIPTION of the linked table’s construction. Here’s how. Open MS Access. Right mouse click on a table that used to work or you are sure does work and choose “Design View”.
This does not make sense for a linked table, but bear with me. Select Yes on the warning screen to continue. If, on the right, there is no properties window for the table, on the Ribbon (Access 2010) click Property Sheet. This reveals a Description property – copy all that it is in that property it and paste it into Notepad or somewhere for later. Click the External Data in the ribbon and choose ‘Linked Table Manager’. CLick the Always prompt for a new location check box – this is a complicated way to ask the user if (s)he wasts to change the connection info.
Click Select All button or choose the tables you wish to update with check marks. Click OK. A dialog comes up.
Click New. Choose SQL Server as your driver.
CLick the Advanced Button. Paste all that stuff in Notepad. EXCEPT REMOVE the TABLE= stuff up to the next semicolon. change the server name to be CDC-EBLEY2-7,1433 where 1433 in my example is the port n. Click OK. It then prompts you to save all this into a file for later.
Chooose a spot in My Documents in a connections folder – or better yet on a network location for other’s to use later. Click OK a couple of times. Now Access will replace all your tables with the new DSN (connection details) string.
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Obviously I didn’t have an answer but I should have stated that (sorry – and not just cause I am Canadian). Check this AutoHotKey solution I posted for you. CHeezy yes – it works like a charm to look every 10 seconds for a SPECIFIC titled popup and clicks it for you. Now you can go get a Latte knowing when you come back all will be done. Many corps block this app – so get it on a stick.
It has gotten me out of lots of troubles here and there. It should not be used in production – but man it works. ALSO – you CAN automate it as an Active-X component – so for me, it works from C#, VBA etc.
Alleviating me from doing it by hand. You can also.exe the script (what I did) and run it as a command line from any programming language or in the background (our case).