"excel found unreadable content" ....

[=A:Z]

Was there ever a determination as to what is happening with the error that "Excel found unreadable content"?

I have a spread about 10-12MB in size and it travels with me on a USB, between work and home (Win XP/SP3). Several times now, over the last year, the file has suddenly come up as having "unreadable content" and Excel's built-in recovery process is useless. In those cases, I have fallen back on an earlier version. This time, fall-back would result in a lot of data loss.

I picked up the Advanced Excel Repair tool and it does seem to show recovered data, but I find it infuriating to have to shell out $90 for a tool that does something the original product should be doing already. $90 is a good chunk of the cost of the entire Office suite to begin with.

I have read several other solutions which involve starting with a fresh spread and then copying or somehow importing the original faulty spread, one worksheet at a time. I can't seem to get that to work: it is possible to copy ranges or worksheets from an existing .xls file into the current worksheet?

I tried opening a fresh spread and then linking, one cell at a time, to the original, and Excel simply says it can't read the file.

So my question is, why can Advanced-Excel-Repair recover the data, but Excel cannot? What is wrong with this spread? It does not have any special features - ie, no external links, vbs code, etc - but it does have some mathematical formulas.

I should mention this is in Excel 2003.

 

[=A:Z]

Also tried Open Office 3 Calc and it simply showed an empty spread (albeit with the proper worksheet names).

 

[cnagel21]

try removing windows update: KB958436 for excel 2003 or KB958437 for excel 2007.
I removed these on the pc's that had this problem and all is well now. Hope this helps.

 

[=A:Z]

Thanks for your reply. I don't see either of those updates installed on my computer, however. Where did you read that something in those updates might lead to this problem? Might there be other Windows updates with similar problems?

 

[cnagel21]

I actually just picked one of the pc's the problem was on and started rolling back updates 1 by 1 and testing workbooks that were "unreadable." I'm not sure what to do if these aren't installed. Did you check in windows and office updates?

 

[=A:Z]

Not really. I don't know what to make of this issue. It is so random that there is nothing to check into and undo. Rollbacks of Windows updates is an interesting approach, but this problem has been happening since last summer, albeit only about 3-4 times. Update rollbacks may introduce problems elsewhere.

It must be something I am doing in the workbook, but I have no idea what.

It does steam me that I might have to shell out real $ to fix a problem that MSFT should be addressing and that product should be fixing in the first place. If the Excel recovery programs work (I have tried three now), the file can't be too terribly corrupted. It's just hosed up bad enough that the Excel init phase can't parse it.

Thanks though!

..jeff