I just had an offer/request from a mate to ask people to upload any corrupt Excel or other MS Office files to his site for automatic/manual recovery.
[EDIT: OOOOoops - seems I jumped the gun a little - the service is not actually live until Tue or Wed next week - so the success rate is just tumbling.
Soz]
No guarantees, and no charge currently.
They are currently quoting a 75% success rate, let us know how you get on.
(I am currently scouring my hard drives for crashers)
I have to say, I haven’t really seen much real corruption recently – Excel 2007 gives up a little easy if the extension doesn’t agree to the internal file format, but that’s not really corruption. Do you see much?
cheers
Simon
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Monday, 10th August, 2009 at 2:09 pm |
I’ve had corruption-type symptoms, but they usually go away when I save the file, close Excel, and start over. On rare occasions, a workbook with too many complex charts will just totally misbehave no matter what I do.
Tuesday, 11th August, 2009 at 11:10 pm |
(I’m the mate in question)
Thanks for the test files, all – they exposed a couple of interesting holes in my round-trip code. My plan here is just to automate round-tripping in a bundle of different versions of apps which can read/write the file type I was given. So it’s not really going to do anything that the man in the street couldn’t do himself, it’s just going to save installing OO2 on the off-chance it recovers your file. I think it’ll supply a report saying “here’s a copy round-tripped in x, here’s a copy round-tripped in y” and you can pick the least corrupted one.
At the moment it only uses OpenOffice 3.1 but it’ll eventually use other versions, along with MS Office. Any other ideas (especially test files) very much appreciated. Just to be above-board here, this isn’t suddenly going to turn into a paid-for service, but eventually a long way down the line I may support it with advertising or allow people to pay to jump the queue (some files take 5+ minutes!).