format change

[Fleet McLellan]

I recently had an event take place that is very
perplexing. Something happened to randomly change some of
my excel and word files format. These files were fine one
day and the next when I tried to open the files I got a
message that states the files are in an unrecognisable
format. If I go to the help file and click on the detect
and repair button it will not fix it. If you preview the
files in my documents they show "x" number of bits of data
but when you open the file there is nothing. Not all files
were affected it seems to be random, any thoughts on what
happened and can the data be recovered? Thanks, Fleet.

 

[Dave Peterson]

The first thing I'd do is to try to find out if the problem was with my copy of
word/excel or with the files themselves.

Can you try to open the files on another pc?

If they open there, then I'd try detect&repair (once more) and maybe reinstall
Office.

If they don't open, then maybe the files got corrupted. Do you have backups?

For excel, both xl2002 and OpenOffice have better reputations for opening files
that earlier versions couldn't.

(http://www.openoffice.org, a 60-65 meg download or a CD)

If the file is really important, there are commercial recovery services. I've
never used it, but you might want to check into:
http://www.officerecovery.com