Does anyone have any unbiased recommendations for an Excel Repair tool. I don't mind paying for a good tool but it seems like if you google Excel repair tool the results are mostly promoted reviews and not unbiased.
I have some xlsm workbooks that crash from time to time so what I wanted to do was run them through a repair tool and see what problems are encountered and where they reside.
I started with the included Open & Repair feature in Excel 365. This is worthless because it provides the same message even if there was nothing repaired. Want to try it. Open a brand new workbook. Enter "a" in cell A1. Save the Test file. Then Go to File > Open and select the Test file with Open and Repair. It obviously can't have any errors since it has 1 character but Excel will still display the message "Excel completed file level validation and repair. Some parts of the workbook may have been repaired or discarded" which means this message and tool is hardly useful since we can't rely on it to identify if a repair was or was not performed. And if you look at the log file it is even more useless and it pretty much states the same thing with no indication of if there was a repair and if so what.
So in looking for a good repair tool I would want to work with as many Excel features Excel as possible (i.e. macros, charts, pivot tables, table, queries, etc). Some tools won't work on macro enabled workbooks (e.g. Stellar). Some won't work with conditional formatting (e.g. Excel Repair Toolbox). And it must (if I'm going to pay for it) have a log file that indicates exactly what problems it found and where they are located so that I can learn and understand what might be causing the problems and how to avoid them in the future. Messages like "tables rebuilt" isn't sufficient as there could be 20 tables in a workbook so the exact table that was repaired is necessary (as an example).
Thanks for any thoughts or recommendations.
I have some xlsm workbooks that crash from time to time so what I wanted to do was run them through a repair tool and see what problems are encountered and where they reside.
I started with the included Open & Repair feature in Excel 365. This is worthless because it provides the same message even if there was nothing repaired. Want to try it. Open a brand new workbook. Enter "a" in cell A1. Save the Test file. Then Go to File > Open and select the Test file with Open and Repair. It obviously can't have any errors since it has 1 character but Excel will still display the message "Excel completed file level validation and repair. Some parts of the workbook may have been repaired or discarded" which means this message and tool is hardly useful since we can't rely on it to identify if a repair was or was not performed. And if you look at the log file it is even more useless and it pretty much states the same thing with no indication of if there was a repair and if so what.
So in looking for a good repair tool I would want to work with as many Excel features Excel as possible (i.e. macros, charts, pivot tables, table, queries, etc). Some tools won't work on macro enabled workbooks (e.g. Stellar). Some won't work with conditional formatting (e.g. Excel Repair Toolbox). And it must (if I'm going to pay for it) have a log file that indicates exactly what problems it found and where they are located so that I can learn and understand what might be causing the problems and how to avoid them in the future. Messages like "tables rebuilt" isn't sufficient as there could be 20 tables in a workbook so the exact table that was repaired is necessary (as an example).
Thanks for any thoughts or recommendations.
