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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  2. Anonymous
    2012-09-26T20:19:57+00:00

    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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2012-10-01T04:20:23+00:00

    I have the same problem with a large spreadsheet. I narrowed it down to 2 lines of data. If I delete either line of the date then when re-opening the file the problem appears. If I open it and allow Excel to do the "repair" by deleting the vmlDrawing1.vml part  all the comments are no longer there. I also cannot copy just the lines of data that are not the problem ones. If I just copy the other lines into a new Worksheet then save and re-open the file again then on the new Worksheet the problem now occurs. The first Worksheet is still OK because it has the offending lines still in it. I note that the second Worksheet has  vmlDrawing2.vml   removed and a third Workdheet has vmlDrawing3.vml removed when Excel does the "repair". Is there someone cleverer than me who would like to receive a copy of this file and have a look at it to see if they can work out why this is happening? I can send a version that has a few columns with comments, one cell with a picture comment, and only 5 lines of data. the file is about 700kB in size. ******@telstra.com.au.

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  4. Anonymous
    2012-10-04T18:35:28+00:00

    Having the same issue, though my spreadsheet does not have any comments--just lots of shapes (many of which are transparent). It took me hours to create this sheet, so this is immensely frustrating. Especially since I have no way of knowing that it won't just get corrupted again if I re-do all my hours of work.

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  5. Anonymous
    2012-10-25T08:18:38+00:00

    Try the following, select all workscheets and move or copy in new workbook.

    Seems to have resolve the problem for one of my excels.

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