Excel 2007 crashed- recovery pane found several versions of unsaved file but cannot open/save latest version because corrupt

[texasfc11]

Yesterday I was working on an excel 2007 spreadsheet that I've been working on for a little over a week now (so there are several saved versions of the file all in different progressions of my work which ends up making my question a bit harder I think). Yesterday excel stopped responding and crashed on me two separate times.

The first time it wasn't a big deal, I had enabled AutoRecovery earlier and sure enough when I opened excel back up the recovery pane had found 3 versions of my file, with the latest one luckily being pretty current (AutoRecovered around 11:30). However, later on in the afternoon around 4pm excel stopped responding and crashed again. When I relaunched the window, the recovery pane only had 1 file version listed and it was the same 11:30 one that was recovered before. I was able to click something (I don't remember what) on the recovery pane and found a file version that was much more recent, from about 5 min or so before it crashed the second time. However, when I tried to click on the "open" or "save" options for that version or really try and view anything about it, excel would not let me do anything with it. It just kept giving me an error message saying something about not able to open/save file because it was corrupt. I tried doing any of the options to "fix the corrupt elements" or edit my macro security in hopes that it would at least let me view the latest version but it wouldn't have any of it.

It "recover" again the 11:30 file, but by only being able to open that version I lost several hours of work between the 2 crashed and recoveries. I tried looking everywhere in my computer and documents, trying to restore any latest version of the file, but it appears that the only version of the workbook that I can see/access now is only the data from 11:30 that was then "recovered" at 4 (even though it didn't recover/add any more data, it just has it listed as last revised after 4 but with none of the new data).

Does ANYONE know anyway that I can try and get at least SOME of my data/hours of work back?! I'm desperate.

 

[hang-the-9]

Nope, nothing you can do with a corrupt file unless it was backed up. The file was not written to the disk correctly, it's just a bunch or basically random bits.

If you are lucky, you may have a temp file on the system with something from the file but that is not too likely. You can search the temp files for something from the time you were working on the file that has a size that is about the size of the file you were working on. It may be a .tmp file, try renaming to .xls and see if it opens. I think I managed to save some data from a lost Excel file that way once, but the data was so scrambled and in a totally different format and location from the good file that they just decided to redo the file rather than work with the messed up data.