Excel.....file error: data may be lost

doodah · 11 Oct 2011 at 10:02

A colleague of mine is having an issue with Excel 2010. When she opens her file a pop up appears stating 'File error: data may be lost'. This Excel files is massive! She has been working with it for years and so it's rather difficult to figure out what data may have been 'lost'. A quick Google seemed to find a pattern with this error and Office 2007 SP3 update but we are using 2010 (recently upgraded from 2007). Any ideas?

Using Windows 7 x64

doodah · 12 Oct 2011 at 11:21

Anyone?

doodah · 17 Oct 2011 at 11:55

Pretty please

?

Participant · 17 Oct 2011 at 12:25

Create a new workbook, copy the data only (not the whole sheet) to the new workbook, see if it still does it. It's unlikely to be any lost data as such, it's probably just a corrupt cell. I'd be amazed if there was a way for anyone on here to tell you how to discover what data has been lost. If she needs to know then the only way is to go through and check the thing, or compare it to previous versions if she has backups etc.

doodah · 18 Oct 2011 at 16:52

Thanks Robbie, will give it a go.

stone48 · 10 Jul 2012 at 14:54

In your case you need to use next utility http://www.recoverytoolbox.com/repair_excel.html which supports restoring excel files starting with MS Excel 97

Sin_Chase · 10 Jul 2012 at 14:58

Excel workbooks grow and grow and grow and grow unnecessarily so. More than just the data/values are stored in the workbook.

I have seen 30,000KB workbooks shrink to less than 1,000KB when copying the data out to a new, fresh workbook and saving.

It's crappy to be honest!