Excel found unreadable content in our business critical spreadsheets

[RockandGrohl]

Hi all,

We've recently moved office and are having problems with opening our key spreadsheets. They will open fine in Read/Write, but upon saving them, they are unable to be re-opened in either R/W or Read-only, giving the above message. When you click repair, it says:

"Removed feature: Worksheet properties from xl/worksheets/sheet1.xlm part"

The trouble is, the filename is now "Price Panels 2020 [repaired]" and the macros to auto-save no longer work, nor will external macros that are expecting the filename to just be "Price Panels 2020"

This is happening with our 2020, 2021 sheets.

Not sure what is causing this, we have no hidden rows or columns. 2020 is a sheet with 16,000 rows and columns up to AF


A work around is to open the sheet, repair it, open in read-only, then save it as "Price Panels 2020 2", close all sheets and delete the old file while re-naming the new one to the original filename. As this needs to be repeated multiple times daily, you can imagine it's becoming quite a pain.


Any help greatly appreciated as we're stuck for the time being, thank you.

 

[jmacleary]

Hello I sympathise - if you've tried to search for this on google there are upwards of 280.000 hits!

I get this from time to time, especially when developing code (not your problem I know) - the only good solution I have come up with goes as follows:

1. Open up one of the problem workbooks (allowing the 'repair' to happen).
2. Start a different copy of excel (by this I mean run excel by clicking on the microsoft excel in your program list) and create a blank workbook. This is very important.
3. For each sheet in your faulty copy:
a. rename a sheet in the blank book to the name from the faulty book
b. copy/paste the used cells from the faulty book into the new book
c. If there is workbook code, right-click the tab and copy the workbook code from the faulty book to the new book
4. If there is workbook code, again copy/paste it from the fault book to the new book
5. If there are modules with code, again copy/paste it from the fault book to the new book
6. If there are forms, export each form from the faulty book and import into the new book.
7. Close the faulty book and rename it.
8. Save the new book with in the correct place with the correct name.

Even doing this didnt work for me once, so what I then did was carry out each of the steps above, but each time I changed a sheet, I saved then reopened to check there was no corruption - when I found the guilty sheet, I just created it from scratch in the new book rather than copy/pasting.

I know this sounds like overkill, but it is the best way I have found to (almost) guarantee an error-free workbook.