Excel Worksheet and backups suddenly get Unreadable Content Message

I was having a very similar issue to this with a worksheet that had a lot of drawing objects on it.  The file would not save properly, and would lose most of the drawing objects.  In researching this I found the following suggestion which worked for me.  Thank you to Thomas Kogoj!

open the xls file, do a save as and save the file in the format: OpenDocument (ods) - close the file, open the ods file and now save it as xlsx. After then everthing is good...

Hope this helps others!

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!

We have the same exact problem with Excel 2010.

Did not find the cause of the problem yet.

We have worksheets that we have been using for months then all of a sudden we get this issue.

We have a quick solution (repair) : Open the file in Word 2007, save it and then you can open it in 2010 and it works fine....

Don't know why but it works...

AB

I had the same problem, except I didn't really have any drawings as such. Well, I had a few "lines" drawn on a chart but removing them didn't do anything. No, after trying different permutations, I realised what it was - grouping and hiding rows. The sheet had a fair bit of information on it and it looks like the worksheet was groaning under the weight - we have other sheets with lots of rows and hidden data but they seem to be ok. When I ungrouped/unhid everything, suddenly the problem disappeared. Then if I grouped a certain section, the error came back. I suspect this is really about grouping/hiding graphs, rather than simply grouping/hiding cells.

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

Hey BKayNJ,

I had this issue too and didn't know what was causing it - It was frustrating because all that work was gone and it happened to me twice already.

Were you working on multiple worksheets?

My guess is that you were....

If you are - one or more of the worksheet is bugged.  If you aren't then that worksheet that you are working on is bugged and you need to recreate the file again on a clean excel.

Here is how I was able to reproduce the error, find the worksheet that was bugged and was able to fix it

1. Open the file and that error will appear after you click "yes" ("Excel found unreadable content in..."  and it offered me to "recover the contents of this workbook".)
2. Re-Save that file after closing the error message (under another file name if you want).
3. Open that new file and that error message shouldn't appear

IF IT THE ERROR MESSAGE DOESN'T APPEAR

4. Select one worksheet and have that as your main and control variable
5. Copy an existing picture comment and paste it to "ONE" of the other worksheet
6. Save the file again (in another file name if you choose to)
7. Open it up again and if you see the error - that is the worksheet where the bug is located.  BUT if you DON'T see the error then that mean that the worksheet is not bugged.
8. If you don't see the error - keep repeating the steps from 4 to 7 until you open the workbook and experience that error.
9. If you didn't happen to find it then it could be that the worksheet that you selected as your control and main (where you copy the picture comment from) is the one that is bugged.

The way I fixed it was removing that worksheet from the workbook and creating a whole new one in a clean excel then merging them together.

I hope this helps but I was facing the same problem and error but was able to reproduce my error and knew what was causing mine.

Good Luck everyone

• JOHN 7L