Excel found Unreadable Content hit or miss

bbrannan

New Member
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
1
Hello,

I have searched the forum for an answer to my question but none of them are really specific to my issue.

Our company runs XP Pro SP2 with office 2003 SP3

We have 3 files out of 11 that give the following error when trying to open them

Excel found unreadable content in '123.xls'. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click yes.

if Yes is clicked....

Errors were detected in '123.xls' but MS office excel was unable to open the file by making the repairs listed below.
Damage to the file was so extensive that repairs were not possible.

All 3 files a simple, 1 worksheet , no formulas/macros/external references.

The 3 files DO open with no issues on 6 other pc's in the company and in our citrix environment (also office 2003 SP3)

To rule out these machines being bad 2 of them were rebuilt but continue to have the issue. Happens to any user that logs into the pc so not profile based issue.

Also have ran the 3 files through multiple Excel file recovery programs. A few of the programs recognise corruption but repairs them as blank worksheets. The other programs see no corruption at all.

Have tried opening the files from different methods..ie) from a network storage drive, email attachment, stored to the local hard drive and remotley from another pc with the files. But hasn't made a difference.

On the hand we have gotten the files to finally open on the known bad pc's. Throughout the 3 excel docs we noticed some cell error's but all the same type "number stored as text".

We did the following to clear the error's
1. went to the bottom of the document and entered the number 1 in and empty cell
2. copied the cell with 1 in it
3. selected the remainder of the worksheet containing data
4. did a edit>paste special and checked off Multiply
5. this cleared all the "number stored as text" errors on the sheet
6. saved as with same filename to a new location

These files can now open on any of the pc's in the company

solved you would say but not really...

still need to understand why this change made it work and if this is the real answer. Also all pc's in question have error checking turned on in excel and when the original files are used on a good machine the "number stored as text" errors are still there but these pc's don't seem to care.

any help or insight would be awesome
 

Excel Facts

Formula for Yesterday
Name Manager, New Name. Yesterday =TODAY()-1. OK. Then, use =YESTERDAY in any cell. Tomorrow could be =TODAY()+1.

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