Corrupted Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, files that ask to be “repaired” in a loop, workbooks that open with everything missing — most of them are recoverable.
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You double-click a file and Excel stops with: The file format and extension of ‘report.xls’ don’t match. The file could be corrupted or unsafe. Unless you trust its source, don’t open it. Do you want to open it anyway? Click Yes and one of three things happens: the workbook opens perfectly, you get a grid full of HTML tags, or you land in the repair dialog. Same message, three different causes. The extension is usually the liar, not the data. ...
You export a CSV from a bank portal, a shop backend, a lab instrument, or a colleague’s Mac. You double-click it. The columns are right, the text is wrong: Müller shows as Müller, Café as Café, apostrophes turn into ’, and a column of Japanese or Greek names becomes rows of ????? or empty boxes. Nothing has been corrupted. Excel read every byte correctly and then decoded them as the wrong character set. That is a fixable mistake — but it has to be fixed in the right order, because one of the obvious moves destroys the data for good. ...
You double-click the deck, the splash screen shows for a second, then the window disappears. No error dialog, no “PowerPoint has stopped working”, nothing in the title bar. Sometimes it happens with one file, sometimes with every file you open. The useful question is whether the program is closing itself or dying while it renders this deck. Those look identical and need different fixes. ...
A workbook that will not open usually fails in one of three ways: Excel reports the file format is wrong, it offers to repair and then repairs nothing, or it opens to a blank or partially empty sheet. Each has a different cause and a different first move. Try these in order. The order matters — step 6 is destructive, and steps 1 to 5 are not. ...
“Word experienced an error trying to open the file” is not one problem. It is a symptom with a short list of causes, and the cause decides which recovery method works. The good news: for .docx, the text almost always survives. The structure around it is what breaks. ...
The loop looks like this: you open the deck, PowerPoint says it found a problem and offers to repair, the repair “succeeds”, you save, and the next open asks again. Nothing is being repaired, because PowerPoint is fixing the symptom each time and writing the same broken part back into the file. ...
You open a workbook and get: We found a problem with some content in ‘report.xlsx’. Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can? Click Yes, and Excel “recovers” the file — usually by deleting something. Click No, and nothing opens. Either way you do not learn what was wrong. This message is different from the generic “file is corrupt” dialog. It means the package is structurally valid and one part failed validation. That is a much better situation, and it is diagnosable. ...
If Word crashed, was force-quit, or the machine rebooted with a document open, the text is often still on disk. Word writes copies to three different places, and which one has your content depends on how far the crash was from your last save. Search them in this order. Do it before reopening Word, because opening a new document can overwrite the most useful folder. ...