Excel found unreadable content in "……………".

[springbrook]

I have received and error message:

Excel found unreadable content in "……………". Do you want to recover contents of this workbook?

This workbook has been used for quite some time now.
There are 3 of us who use this workbook nearly every day.
It opens fine on my pc but not on the other 2 (we all run 2007)

Now when they open the workbook it comes up with the following error.
If they open an older version its ok, however if I open it, do nothing to it, save it and then close it, the error appears.

It seems to be since Thursday last week when my 'automatic updates' were done.
Some thing has changed !

Nothing has been altered at all.

I need of desperate help.

Thanks in advance
Springbrook

 

[Warship]

Hi all, I'm new to this forum, but I found this post while Googling for an answer to that problem, which I just had myself.

One thing you can try doing? Don't double-click on the file to open it. Instead, in Excel, go to File -> Open. Click once on the file name. In the lower-right corner where the Open button is, click on the arrow next to it.

Click the arrow, and choose Open and Repair. I got that to work flawlessly. Hope that helps others.

Cheers
Geoff

Thank You a Thousand over! I dreaded the thought of rebuildling my very complex workbook.

I was getting the "unreadable" any time data was added via a certain user form which effected serveral sheets. I could open and go thru the renaming process and all was good until using the userform again. My endusers would have been lost.

So far intial testing shows the Open & Repair did the trick.

Much obliged,
Roy

 

[duncannaylor]

Hi there, have been having this problem for weeks and may have found a solution.

I am also using a complex query to extract and filter data from an external source, with a number of other sheets containing named ranges and other external data. I then have a number of columns in the main worksheet to analyse the data. Everything works fine until I insert calculated columns within the data returned from the query - when I save and reopen I get the 'unreadable content' message and on repair #3 the query definition gets removed and I lose the formatting.

By keeping all of my calculated columns to the right of the data returned the problem seems to be solved.

Very odd indeed - let me know if this works for you.

Cheers

 

[Warship]

What caused this for me was sorting single row ranges.

I have 9 ranges of 4 columns with varying row counts, each connected to a combobox, each on its own page.

The items in the lists migrate back and forth thru the lists depending on its status. Sorting was part of the sub after a list change. Any time a range was sorted that had only one row, that page would throw the error the next time the file was launched. Once I qualified my sort routine, all is well.

As always, thanks to all who help make this board the GREATEST!

Roy

 

[bassmanian]

I had a similar problem using Excel 2007 with a workbook that started to report that it was corrupted upon opening. In my case I had recently added a routine that was sorting a range with 3 sort keys which could be defined by the user.

I found that if any 2 of these sort keys referred to the same cell the sort would work fine but upon saving and reopening the file I would get the message "Excel has found unreadable content....".

The automatic recovery always worked with its log file reporting "Removed Records: Sorting from /xl/worksheets/sheet10.xml part" which gave me the clue that it was related to sorting even though I had no sheet with the name sheet10.

Recoding to avoid duplicate keys solved it. I hope this helps someone else to get rid of this annoying error which could be a bit more explicit.
Ian

 

[bradmo]

I also experienced this problem after converting a workbook to the 2007 file format. The problem in my case was due to invalid named ranges. To fix, I opened the Name Manager under the Formulas tab in Excel 2007, filtered by "Names with Errors", and deleted all of the names in the list.

 

[GAJF]

Just to confirm I had this issue on several files (some as small as 3 MB) and nothing in this forum fixed the issue except for removing the links.
The problem didn't appear until we had a 2007 PC saving in 2003 formatting added into the mix. Cheers

 

[StreetMike]

A couple of weeks ago this started happening to virtually every one of our spreadsheets, sporadically. We tried copying the data and formulas to completely new books (a real PITA with formatting and whatnot) but it seems to recur anyway. WARNING: if you say "attempt to recover data," some of your formulas - especially ones which had errors at the time you saved, it seems - will be turned to hard-coded values with no warning. If your sheet involves many cross-relationships you need to check every formula to be sure you are not using hard-coded values.

This seems pervasive enough through all our sheets that we suspect this is a Microsoft issue. Has anyone else seen this problem?

 

[JFH229]

I confirm I get sporadically this problem, especially with sheets that access to external data, e.g ODBC.
The effect is that reference to external data (links) are replaced by static data (values)

 

[StreetMike]

There seems to be a "hotfix" for the problem, but the hotfix seems old enough that I'm not sure I want to install it (and it should have been included in cumulative update since then).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954894

 

[iagolfer]

Our company just upgraded our O-07 to sp2 on the suggestion of one of our add-in application providers (Infor's f9). We just upgraded to their newest version 5 that requires Excel-2007. After having some problems with the app they noted we weren't on sp2 and told us to upgrade.

Soon after we upgraded we started having this problem. We had not experienced it when on base E-07. The Sp2 we loaded should have had the hotfix from July 1,2008 you reference but it doesn't look like it fixed the problem (at least for us).

I am attempting the Open & repair option suggested, hopefully it will repair the formulas. The strange part is, the only formulas removed on this file were normal calculations (add, subtract, multiply), nothing related to pulling data from our ERP system using f9 add-in.