Excel Worksheet and backups suddenly get Unreadable Content Message

Anonymous
2010-04-20T15:54:27+00:00

I have a 400 line Excel 2007 single worksheet spreadsheet.

Each row has a Comment inserted in one of the cells. The Comment has been formatted as follows: "Size" has been adjusted, "Colors and Lines" has been adjusted by choosing "Color", "Fill Effects", "Picture", "Select Picture" and a .jpg file from a certain folder is selected.

The result is that when I hover over this cell in any given row, the .jpg file that was placed in the Comment appears.  There are other simple text comments in several other cells in the worksheet.

This all was working fine for me for several months, and I was making backups just to be safe.

Suddenly, I started getting "Excel found unreadable content in..."  and it offered me to "recover the contents of this workbook". When I choose to recover, I get my entire worksheet back without any comments (ones with .jpgs and ones without), and I am told "Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content".

I also get a chance to view the "log file" and this is its contents:

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

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

<logFileName>error053200_01.xml</logFileName>

<summary>Errors were detected in file 'C:\Users\Bruce Kay\Desktop\Documents\DOCUMENTS ON iPhone\All Casino Chip Collection.xlsx'</summary>

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

<removedPart>Removed Part: /xl/drawings/vmlDrawing1.vml part. (Drawing shape)</removedPart>

</removedParts>

</recoveryLog>

The same thing happens with all of my backups of this sheet, and those were backups of working versions of this sheet.

This is all unbelievably frustrating.

Does anyone think this was due to an automatic update by Microsoft?

Do you have any suggestions for recovery?

Thanks

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-10-28T09:35:46+00:00

    dlauzon, my zip file cannot open. it said : "Unexpected end of archive".

    I don't know why but do you have any solution to extract the problem file?

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-10-20T12:48:06+00:00

    It worked so far that I could see the error in the xml-Tool. But I did not succeed in changing the file in the "zip" and rename it. In my Win 8.1 it seems to be not allowed to change a file within a zip-file.

    But the more interesting point is how to avoid that error

    I can reproduce the problem by simply copying a worksheet. (in it there are many pictures which are used as a "filling effect" in the color property of a comment. = if you move your mouse over the pic in the worksheet it is enlarged as a comment)

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-08-26T07:00:43+00:00

    You can verify that your images are still there by looking in the folder \xl\media\ (step 6)

    If they are, I suggest you try to correct the VML file with the vbs code from scadam posted on April 4, 2014.

    Just paste and save his code in a notepad file named CorrectVML.vbs, do step 1 to 7 of my post and then drop the vml file on the file CorrectVML.vbs and then do step 12 to 14.

    thanks... but it didn't work. the problem is in drawing2.xml and drawing3.xml. when i look in the code i see all the text boxes and rectangles, the arrows...

    but when i check the code it come back just fine... nothing work to dix it...

    p.s in xl/media there is only one pic i have in the spreadsheet.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-08-25T22:47:46+00:00

    You can verify that your images are still there by looking in the folder \xl\media\ (step 6)

    If they are, I suggest you try to correct the VML file with the vbs code from scadam posted on April 4, 2014.

    Just paste and save his code in a notepad file named CorrectVML.vbs, do step 1 to 7 of my post and then drop the vml file on the file CorrectVML.vbs and then do step 12 to 14.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-08-25T20:06:07+00:00

    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.

    hi!

    i tried it and didnt find any errors in those XML...

    what can i do??

    i had a file with lots of pics and everything were gone...

    thanks!

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