How do I recover corrupt Excel file?

Clarifications

Don't worry. It's not that big problem as it seems to be. Did you try to open excel spreadsheet by [b]Open and Repair[/b]? If the file has some minor corruption issues, then they will be resolved and file will be opened.

Or you may also try to open the file in OpenOffice.org Calc. Sometimes a corrupt XLSX file may get opened in Calc application. And if you are still having problem to open XLSX file, then you can take help of third-party excel recovery software.

I've had a lot of trouble with both Excel 2013 and Excel 2010 crashing and coming back to tell me it's lost everythng. Well actually it says the file is corrupt, but it really should display a message saying it lost it, because that's exactly what has happened., There's a bug where Excel keeps a 1k or 2k marker file in the autosave directory, by default C:\Users\you_user_name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\ but prematurely moves the actual file to the Recycle Bin. It appears that Excel sees the marker pointing to where the file should be then vomits when the file isn't there and tells you it's corrupt. Forgetting, oopsey-daisy, that it threw it away.

When you get this message be sure to go look in the Recycle Bin where, odds are better than even, you will find a pristine, completely in tact .xlsb version of you "corrupt" file.

Good work, Microsoft! And Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, but you're not going to give existing customers a discount anymore against the new version of Office? Shame on you Microsoft - you don't need to be greedy when you're the richest man alive!

In the past months, the users were complaining about corrupt Excel files which were on the file server [we use terminal server with folder redirection and roaming profiles. Profile and user folders are on the file server]. Restore from backups did not help, the files were corrupt again. We have tried e-mailing the corrupt file to another user and have that user open the file without saving it. It worked magically and I have solved many more incidents the same way. I know this sounds ridiculous but this is how it worked.

[If you are curious, there is not a slightest chance of bad sector/disk errors on the file server. It is a virtualized server and the disks are on the Fiber Channel SAN.]