Good Old Microsoft
I tried to open a complicated Excel file today and Excel told me that it was corrupted and that it would try to rebuild it. Having tried to rebuild it, Excel reported the file was beyond repair. Now I have a backup somewhere, but I tried an experiment. I fired up the Open Office freeware clone of Excel (I think it is called Calc). It opened the Excel file that Excel itself could not open or rebuild. I re-saved the file using Open Office and now all is working fine and Excel can now read the worksheet again. The $0 clone succeeds where the $400 original fails.
OneEyedMan:
I find open office an insufferably horrible program that takes forever to load on modern hardware and crashes constantly. I'd take Microsoft office almost all the time.
January 4, 2008, 10:50 amRob (another Rob):
I have heard of this trick before. If MSFT would stop fiddling with the file structure of their products it would be very helpful.
This the oldest and nastiest sort of market protection. I go back far enough that I remember a part of the market dedicated to discovering and publishing (book form) the file structure of all of these proprietary files. There was also a market for software which would translate Wordstar to Word Perfect to Word to.... Visicalc to Lotus123 to Excel.... What utter nonsense.
I'm betting that it could all be packed into XML... sigh..
I haven't worked with open office, but the MSFT suite is painfully slow to load and gets stuck in the mud from time to time on my systems which ARE modern hardware
January 4, 2008, 10:57 amJimC:
While I find the OO suite to be a pain with the starter program in the lower right hand corner, and a slow loading without the starter, I do find it to be a great value for 99% of my duties. My wife's company runs it exclusively, saving in MS format (why? "because everyone else does it" AARRRGGH).
It shines in fixing goofy MS format changes, can handle password protected sheets for editting, and is generally a better "buy" overall.
The only shortcoming is that it doesn't handle text file (columnar format) documents as well as excel. For text parsing, excel is really good.
Overall, it is a great product. Glad to hear it saved your bacon. Its saved mine numerous times.
January 4, 2008, 11:54 amJimC:
While I find the OO suite to be a pain with the starter program in the lower right hand corner, and a slow loading without the starter, I do find it to be a great value for 99% of my duties. My wife's company runs it exclusively, saving in MS format (why? "because everyone else does it" AARRRGGH).
It shines in fixing goofy MS format changes, can handle password protected sheets for editting, and is generally a better "buy" overall.
The only shortcoming is that it doesn't handle text file (columnar format) documents as well as excel. For text parsing, excel is really good.
Overall, it is a great product. Glad to hear it saved your bacon. Its saved mine numerous times.
January 4, 2008, 11:54 amla petite chou chou:
The part about the money seemed about right to me. Typical.
January 4, 2008, 7:59 pmM.:
Had the same experience with a couple of Word documents, only MS Word didn't just fail to open them but for one of them fell on its back (GPF) while doing it. Opened them in OO, saved them, one lost 98 Kb in file size (but all the content was there) and MS Word could open them after that.
January 6, 2008, 3:12 amzlatan24:
Where is fine tool-excel file repair, it is used to extract information from corrupted Microsoft Excel files, can easily and quickly recover information that seems to be lost forever, can recover the contents of all cells, formulas, formatting, etc., It is especially important because worksheets are usually used to process statistical, scientific, commercial and other really important data, Even one corrupted file may become a serious problem in all these cases.
July 29, 2008, 12:25 pm