Excel on Mac - file repair issues

[dskills]

Hey all,

I'm running Excel 16.77.1 on a Macbook Pro (M1, 14", Ventana 13.5.2). While I was happily working on a file, I suddenly started getting the following messages when I opened up my file:

• Alert: "We found a problem with some content in 'Filename'. Do you want us to recover as much as we can? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes." [I click yes as this is my file]
• Alert: "This workbook contains links to one or more external sources that could be unsafe. If you trust the links, update them to get the latest data. Otherwise, you can keep working with the data you have." [I've tried both Don't Update and Update - doesn't seem to matter]
• Alert: "Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content." [There are then options to View or Delete. I've tried both. I hit Delete.
  • If I view the files, it opens Word and shows me some repair records for some of the Pivot Tables in the file.
  • If I remove the PivotTables mentioned in the file, it makes no difference - if I reopen the document after deleting one of the named PivotTables I still get the same error and the list of PivotTables has simply change - so if the problem was PivotTable10, now it's PivotTable8, etc.
• I then save the file under a new name - but if I open the new file, we just get the same process all over again.

What I've tried:

• Copying the sheets to a new spreadsheet.
• Copying the data, sheet-by-sheet, to a new spreadsheet.
• Moving the file over to Windows and opening with the repair option, saving it and then moving it back to the Mac.
• Processing the file with a common "Excel Repair" tool.
• Importing the file into Google Sheets and then downloading back as an Excel file.
• Restarting Excel.
• Restarting the Mac.

At this point I'm stumped - and the file is important or I wouldn't be doing all this work. It's also not happening with any other spreadsheet. The spreadsheet does seem to act strangely as well - very slow responses to mouse clicks and text edits.

Update: I'm really wondering if there is something wrong with my version of Excel. I started rebuilding the spreadsheet and added a Pivot table. I then tried to group some of the rows. I got the message "We couldn't complete the action for the PivotTable "Pivotname" in the sheet "FilePivot" because there's already a PivotTable "PivotTable4" there. Make space and try again." But this was a brand new sheet with no other pivot table in it - and I don't have a PivotTable4 anywhere that I can see in the new spreadsheet. So weird.

Anybody got any ideas for anything else I could do short of just rebuilding the spreadsheet?

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[dskills]

Update: Removed all sheets that had pivot tables and the file seems fine - conclusion so far: pivot tables in the latest release are broken.