Excel Worksheet and backups suddenly get Unreadable Content Message

I am having a similar issue (see error message below). I re-created the excel sheet from scratch and halfway through I closed the file and started getting the error message again. I need urgent help on this issue. Are there any tools we can use to fix this?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

**-** <recoveryLog xmlns="**http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main**">

<logFileName>error052800_01.xml</logFileName>

<summary>Errors were detected in file 'C:\Users\Johannao\Documents\Finance\2010\JOH_Budget_2010.xlsx'</summary>

**-** <removedParts summary="Following is a list of removed parts:">

<removedPart>Removed Part: /xl/drawings/drawing2.xml part. (Drawing shape)</removedPart>

</removedParts>

</recoveryLog>

Am recieving the same error message when trying to open a workbook with pictures and sames pasted in certain cells.  The issue persists even when opening a backup version of the file from a date I am %100 certain the file was fine.

Am I really going to just put up with completely redoing a workbook every month or so?  This is the second workbook this has happened too, both are being used in similar ways.

Any more recent progress on this issues?

  -Brad

Below is error details...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

**-** <recoveryLog xmlns="**http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main**">

<logFileName>error045960_01.xml</logFileName>

<summary>Errors were detected in file 'G:\Brad\WIP\SPID 2402 NORTHFIELD CHUCK.xlsx'</summary>

**-** <repairedRecords summary="Following is a list of repairs:">

<repairedRecord>Repaired Records: Drawing from /xl/drawings/drawing1.xml part (Drawing shape)</repairedRecord>

</repairedRecords>

</recoveryLog>

I had the same problem using Excel 2013 on an .xlsx file with images inside comments.

I was able to get the document back to a working state, and at the same time see where the corruption is.

Here's what worked for me (summary: remove a couple of bogus tags in an embedded text file):

1. take a backup of the file (just in case)
2. open the file and accept Excel's tentative to recover the file
3. note the full path of the "removed part" file, e.g. "/xl/drawings/vmlDrawing2.vml"
4. close the file without saving
5. rename the file to end with .zip (e.g. myExcelFile.xlsx.zip)
6. open the zip file, it shows as a folder hierarchy (if you're curious to see where your images are stored, I found them fully readable under the following folder in the zip file: \xl\media\ )
7. extract the problematic file found in step 3, e.g. "/xl/drawings/vmlDrawing2.vml"
8. open it with Notepad
9. if you want to see what is wrong with this file, you can copy and paste its whole text content to an online XML syntax checker (e.g. http://www.w3schools.com/dom/dom_validate.asp).  Mine showed duplicate attributes on a given line (once you correct a line, you can re-paste your corrected text to find the next error, and so on).
10. Here's the bug I had: all the v:fill tags had multiple o:relid attributes, even a working file has multiple, and it shouldn't, but in the case of the broken file, one of those attributes is different from the others, e.g.: v:fill o:relid="rId3" o:relid="rId3" o:relid="rId3" o:relid="rId3" o:relid="rId3"  o:relid="rId2"  <--- note the "rId2" instead of ="rId3" like the rest of the line
11. for each v:fill tag, remove all but the last o:relid (in the previous example, that part of the line would now be v:fill o:relid="rId2" )
12. once you have verified this for each v:fill, the XML of the file should be ok (step 9), save the file and put it back in the zip (overwriting the original one)
13. rename the Excel file to its original name (e.g. myExcelFile.xlsx) by removing the .zip extension added in step 5
14. open the file with Excel, everything is back to normal

The error is probably due to changes that force renumbering of the existing images such as removing a line on which there is a comment with a picture on it (if it's not the last picture added) - I can reproduce the bug every time I remove one such line.  We can see that just the last entry ("rId2") is corrected, the rest stay the same ("rId3"), and Excel can't cope with those different values for the same tag.  To Microsoft: preventing multiple occurrences of the same attribute on a given tag should be the initial goal to solve this issue.

I have got the error msg. in Excel 2010

The problem seems to persist in Excel.  Including pictures within comments works 90% of the time but every so often, one of the many files we use here will suddenly crump saying that Excel found 'unreadable content' and the comments are all dumped from the worksheet.

This sounds related to all the post's above, but here is the exact error report:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

**-**<recoveryLog xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main">

<logFileName>error064800_01.xml</logFileName>

<summary>Errors were detected in file 'C:\Documents and Settings\sa224c\Desktop\Conversion Files\Misc_Fcst_Actuals.xlsm'</summary>

**-**<removedParts summary="Following is a list of removed parts:">

<removedPart>Removed Part: /xl/drawings/vmlDrawing4.vml part. (Drawing shape)</removedPart>

</removedParts>

</recoveryLog>

.

Any help that can be offerred on this subject would be appreciated.  Unfortunately, I also use Excel 2007 features, i.e. rolling back to 2003 is not an option, and we have dozens of these files in use that cannot be re-created weekly every time this function corrupts.  It appears that this issue was first noted in 2011, so I would expect that someone has found a reasonable solution or cause for the problem.

Thanks in advance.