Corrupt Excel (.xslm) file. Lost almost all data

[oceanspace]

Please help me recover this file. I've been working on this for the past 3 weeks and would be pretty devastated if all data is lost. I have no clue why this error is occuring.


Situation

Context is that I can no longer open my Excel file (and when I repair, most of the data is lost). I get the following error:
"Excel found unreadable content in <filename.xlsm>. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes"

When I click yes, I get the following notification:

"This workbook contains links to other data sources.
If you update the links, Excel will attempt to retrieve the latest data. If you don't update the Links, Excel will use the previous information"
Whether or not I click update or don't update, I get a notification saying "Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content" with the following logs (not comprehensive):

<removedrecords summary="Following is a list of removed records:"><removedrecord>Removed Records: Cell information from /xl/worksheets/sheet2.xml part</removedrecord>
<removedrecord>Removed Records: Cell information from /xl/worksheets/sheet3.xml part</removedrecord>


Attempts at fixing Excel

I've applied the following solutions to no avail:

1. Resave file as ".xlsb" or ".xlsm"
2. Control Panel -> Microsoft Office 2010 --> Download VBA
3. Used MS Excel Repair Tools
4. Restarted computer

Other comments

1. Other people are not able to open the file, and I was the original owner of the file. When I had worked on it last night, everything was fine.
2. All previous versions of the ".xlsm" file have the same error

If anyone could provide any insight, I would really appreciate it. I hypothesize that this is a VBA / macro issue but don't know where this error comes from.</removedrecords></filename.xlsm>

 

[mole999]

Re: Corrupt Excel (.xslm) file. Lost almost all data - pls help!

you might try > Repair a corrupted workbook - Excel

we will all sympathise when this happens, I use steps to save later version whilst building, and have autosave always turned on. There is an addin which I can't rember what it is called, but you load that and then load the problem file to fix problems, and bad loading (not 100%), have you got any archives or fragments you can revert to ?

 

[MARK858]

Re: Corrupt Excel (.xslm) file. Lost almost all data - pls help!

Another thing you can try is saving it as a HTML file then try opening as a xls.

 

[oceanspace]

Re: Corrupt Excel (.xslm) file. Lost almost all data - pls help!

you might try > Repair a corrupted workbook - Excel

we will all sympathise when this happens, I use steps to save later version whilst building, and have autosave always turned on. There is an addin which I can't rember what it is called, but you load that and then load the problem file to fix problems, and bad loading (not 100%), have you got any archives or fragments you can revert to ?

Thanks for the comment mole999. I've tried the above and no luck there. What's strange is that even previous versions of the .xlsm file are facing the same error. Thanks for your help anyway - guess I'll have to rebuild.

 

[oceanspace]

Re: Corrupt Excel (.xslm) file. Lost almost all data - pls help!

Another thing you can try is saving it as a HTML file then try opening as a xls.

Gave it a shot - didn't work unfortunately. Thanks anyways.