Corrupt Excel Repair

What Happens When You Drop a File Here

A modern Excel file is a ZIP archive of XML parts. "Corrupt" almost always means one of those parts is missing, truncated, or no longer parses. The diagnostic runs three checks in your browser, in this order, and reports what each one found:

1. Open the package. The file is opened as a ZIP. If that fails, the archive is damaged beyond the entry list, encrypted, or not an XLSX at all - and nothing further can be read.
2. Look for the parts a workbook cannot live without. [Content_Types].xml, xl/workbook.xml and xl/_rels/workbook.xml.rels. Each missing part is listed as an error, and every xl/worksheets/sheetN.xml found is shown by name so you can see how much of the workbook is still there.
3. Try to parse the workbook model. The whole file is handed to the SheetJS parser. If that succeeds and at least one worksheet part exists, the recovery export is unlocked.

Reading the Four Statuses

What Recovery Keeps and What It Drops

Recovery reads every sheet the parser can see and writes the cell values into a brand new workbook. Sheet names and their order are kept (trimmed to Excel's 31-character limit). Everything that is not a value is not carried across:

• Formulas become static values - the last result Excel stored before the file broke.
• Dates arrive as the underlying serial number, because number formats are not copied. Re-apply a date format in Excel, or use the date converter.
• Formatting, merged cells and column widths are gone; the output is a plain grid.
• Charts, images, pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation and comments are not written.
• Macros are lost - a repaired .xlsm comes back as .xlsx.

How Workbooks Get Corrupted

The usual causes are mundane and worth knowing, because they tell you where an intact copy might still exist: a save interrupted over a network share or VPN, two sync clients writing the same file, a download that finished short, a mail gateway rewriting the attachment, or a crash while Excel was mid-write. In every one of those cases the previous good version usually survives somewhere - OneDrive or SharePoint version history, the network share's snapshots, or the sender's Sent folder. Check there before spending time on repair.

If This Page Cannot Recover It

Work in this order. Copy the damaged file first and leave the original alone. In Excel, use File → Open → Browse, select the file, then choose Open and Repair from the dropdown next to the Open button; if a full repair fails, run it again and choose Extract Data. If Excel refuses too, rename a copy to .zip and look inside: the presence of xl/worksheets/ tells you the data is physically there, even when no reader will open it.

When the file itself is missing rather than damaged - closed without saving, deleted, or overwritten - repair is the wrong tool. See Excel Recovery for what can and cannot be got back. For the part-by-part view of an XLSX package, use XLSX Repair, and for the same diagnostic with the full report walkthrough, Excel Repair.