Excel Spreadsheet Corruption due to Improper System Shutdown

Excel files have been prone to corruption, and, one main reason is improper or sudden shutdown of the system. Sometimes, it may happen accidentally or sometimes due to power cut. No matter whatever the reason for corruption is, the thing which matters is your data stored in the file which becomes inaccessible after corruption. An ideal way to combat the issue is to use a backup file to restore the data. But, in case you did not backup the data stored in the Excel file or the backup file is not available, then you can repair excel file using a powerful third-party file repair application. This enables you retrieve all the data from the corrupted Excel file.

Picture a practical situation - Suppose, you are adding a few contact details of your clients to your Excel spreadsheet. You are in progress of doing so and suddenly there is a power cut due to some mechanical reasons, which causes your system to shutdown improperly. When the power comes back, you restart the system only to see that the spreadsheet refuses to open and instead prompts following error messages:

"Unable to open file"

"Unable to read file, file format not valid."

"Cannot find the file."

After you encounter any one of these error messages, the spreadsheet does not open. And the problem persists, no matter how many times you try to open the spreadsheet.

Cause:

The reason why the spreadsheet does not open is because it is corrupt. The main reason behind its corruption can be improper or unexpected system shutdown due to power failure.

Resolution:

You can recover the contents of the corrupted spreadsheet using 'Open and Repair' command. Follow these steps to do so:

Start MS Excel and click 'Open' on the 'File' menu.
Select the desired file in the 'Open' menu. Then, select 'Open and Repair' by clicking the arrow on 'Open' button.
Click 'Repair' to recover the contents of the spreadsheet.

But, a main drawback of this option is that it recovers only the recent changes made to the spreadsheet and not the entire data. In such a situation, you should go for an advanced excel repair software to retrieve your data. These applications are specially designed to scan and repair excel file effectively. An additional advantage of these tools is that they restore the repaired file without altering its original contents or settings. And a software with intuitive graphical user interface enables you to repair the file and extract data with ease.