Your Excel file can corrupt due to several reasons. When the file is corrupt or damaged, Excel throws different errors. Sometimes, you may get an error when you try to open the corrupt file, or the Excel file does not open.

This post will discuss the five most common Excel Errors that can occur due to corruption. It also mentions the causes of the corruption in the Excel file and the Excel file repair solutions.

Before proceeding toward the list of errors, let us explore why Excel files are corrupted.

Causes behind Corrupt Excel File

An Excel file gets corrupt due to various reasons. Following are some possible reasons behind the Excel file corruption:

• Unexpected power failures.
• Sudden system shutdown.
• Virus/malware attack.
• Corrupt hard drive.
• Corrupt sectors in the storage media.
• Damaged Operating system.
• Conflicting applications.

5 Most Common Excel Errors That Occur Due to Corruption.

When you open the corrupt workbook in Excel, you may get various errors. Here is the list of the five common Excel errors that can occur due to corruption in an Excel file:

Error 1-We found a problem with some content in the Excel file:

This error appears as “We found a problem with some content in ‘filename.xlsx.’ Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can? If you trust the source of this workbook, click yes. “

Many users reported this error when they tried to open the Excel file saved on a network-shared drive. It usually occurs due to corruption in an Excel file.

Error 2- “Excel cannot open the file filename.xlsx because the file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file.”

You may encounter this error message when opening an older version of an Excel file in a newer version. It generally occurs when you have accidentally renamed the file with an incorrect file extension or if the file has become unreadable or corrupted.

Error 3-Unable to read file

The “unable to read file” error can occur when you try to open a corrupt file in Microsoft Excel. It appears like this:

Error 4- The File Is Corrupt and Cannot Be Opened

Each time when you try to open a corrupt/damaged Excel file you can get the “The File is corrupt and cannot be opened” error.

Error 5- Excel Was Able To Open the File by Repairing or Removing the Unreadable Content

How to Fix the Errors That Occur Due to Corruption?

When you experience any of the above errors, you can follow the basic Excel recovery solutions to troubleshoot the same. The following are the methods to repair the corrupt Excel file:

Revert to the Earlier File Version

Microsoft Excel has an auto-recover option that saves the file version automatically. If this feature is enable, you can use it to revert to the file’s earlier version. Below are the steps to use the Recover Unsaved Workbooks option:

• Open the Excel file (if you can open it).
• Go to File option, click Info, and then choose Manage Versions.
• Select Recover Unsaved Workbooks.
• Click on the available last auto-saved file version and then click Open. 
• Click File > Save As to save the file. 

Repair Corrupt File using Open and Repair Utility

Microsoft Excel has a built-in utility – Open and Repair – to repair damaged or corrupted Excel file. To repair the file using this utility, follow these steps:

• Go to File > Open > Browse. 
• In the Open dialog box, click on the corrupted Excel file. 
• Click the arrow next to the Open button and click Open and Repair from the dropdown.
• Select Repair to recover as much data from the file as possible.

Alternate Solution: MS Excel Repair Tool

If none of the above methods works, you can use an advanced Excel repair tool, such as Stellar Repair for Excel. The tool can repair severely corrupted Excel files (.xls, .xlsx) and restore all the data with 100 % integrity. It is easy to install and compatible with all versions of MS Excel. It also provides preview of all the recoverable items before saving. It can help you in fixing corruption errors in Excel workbooks.

Closure 

Corrupt Workbooks can trigger the Excel to throw errors. In this post, we have discussed the five common Excel errors that occur due to corruption. When Excel detects corruption in a workbook, it tries to repair the workbook by starting the “File Recovery mode”. If it does not work, you can start Excel file repair using the abovementioned methods.

In addition, you can try Microsoft’s built-in Repair utility tool called Open and Repair. If the Open and Repair tool does not work, try a professional Excel file recovery tool, such as Stellar Repair for Excel. A professional tool can repair severely damaged or corrupted Excel files of any version (.xls, .xlsx, .xltm, .xltx, and .xlsm).