How to test Excel file for corruption?

G

Guest

Hi,

We've had a problem here with an excel file, and I think it's because it's
been corrupted, but I don't want to restore a file from a month ago.

Essentially, about a month ago we made the workbook shared. It continued to
work fine for a while, but about a week ago, people started reporting having
Excel crash when opening the file. The error message given is:

"Excel.exe has generated errors and will be closed by windows. You will
need to restart the program. An error log is being created."

I've successfully opened the file when everybody else has been claiming it's
crashed, but it only works once, then I can't do it again. We've restored
numerous backups of the file and each time I can open it once, then it seems
to crash from then on. The backups stretch back to when we had the file in
an unshared state, which is where the file now appears to work fine.

We think something has either been updated on the system in the last week or
so, or that something has corrupted the file ever so slightly that causes it
to crash. We have other workbooks that are just the same size (if not
larger) and are shared which still work fine. It appears to be solely this
file.

Is there any way to externally edit the file (such as a hex editor) to
restore any kind of file corruption that has occured?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Rob.
 
J

Jan Karel Pieterse

Hi Robert,
We have other workbooks that are just the same size (if not
larger) and are shared which still work fine. It appears to be solely this
file.

As you have experienced, shared workbooks are a buggy feature of Excel, which
is why I always advise against it. Use Access if you need to work on shared
information simultaneously with multiple users.
Is there any way to externally edit the file (such as a hex editor) to
restore any kind of file corruption that has occured?

Have a look at:

www.jkp-ads.com/Articles/CorruptFiles.htm

(near bottom of page).

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
Excel MVP
http://www.jkp-ads.com
 

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