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
    2016-04-28T16:38:34+00:00

    Thank you dlauzon!  These instructions worked perfectly for me, like a charm. Even the name of the corrupt file was the same.  Awesome!

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-04-23T18:37:57+00:00

    Just to follow up on my experience up thread - 

    I had this same problem almost two years ago.  I had over 50 pivot graphs that would blow up and not be recovered whenever this error occurred.  It was a huge setback.  What ended up working was to simply save the workbook as a previous (pre2007) version of an excel file, close the file, reopen it and save back as a 2007 file (xlsx in this case).  I have had no problems with the file ever since I tried this fix.

    I realize that we probably have several problems within this thread that all come up with the same error but the bottom line is that this fix is so simple to try that I would make it your first stop before going the coding route.  With any luck it is helpful to folks.

    Good luck.

    Dan

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-08-23T15:28:52+00:00

    I faced same problem today as well.

    Had pictures in the comment field

    Now Excel 2010 tells me

    "Excel found unreadable content .... "

    Excel was able to open the file by repairing or removing the unreadable content

    Removed Part: /xl/drawings/vmlDrawing1.vml part.  (Drawing shape)"

    The pictures are gone !!!

    Have you found a fix other than recreating the sheet.

    Thanks

    Ashiq

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  4. Anonymous
    2010-06-21T16:34:13+00:00

    Office Version:Excel 2007

    Operating System:Windows 7 (on x86)

    I have macros that are used to link values from mulltiple sheets to one "exchange file" that holds values between all the other sheets. I get a similar error to that above when trying to call the "exchange file".

    However...

    Office Version:Excel 2007

    Operating System:Vista (on x86)

    I do not get any error, and my macros work fine. The macros were initially created in Excel using a Vista machine and then a second set of similar spreadsheets (with the same macros) were created using a Windows 7 machine.

    Could it be a Windows 7 and Excel 2007 problem?

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  5. Anonymous
    2010-04-21T14:23:47+00:00

    Black Barron, thanks for taking time to respond and thanks for your suggestion

    This is what I'm trying to avoid - recreating the sheet by having to manually insert the .jpg files into Comments - a real pain.

    Actually, this happened once before (months ago) and that's what I had to do. Now it happened again, and if I spend the time to fix it, I fear it could just happen a 3rd time some day.

    Also, all the comments I had that did not have a .jpg inserted are not recreatable.

    What frustrates me, is that by virtue of the size of the file before I tell Excel to "recover" seems to be the size that has all the .jpg information still in there, whereas after it recovers the file, discarding the "so-called" unreadable part, the file is MUCH smaller, but has every cell filled with the correct data except for all the Comments that had .jpgs in it or not.

    Taking another approach, and I don't have the talent to do this myself, one cell in each row has the name of the jpg file (without the path and the ".jpg" extension) of the image I want to insert into the comment in another cell in that row.  If I could automate this process, the recreation of this spreadsheet would not be so daunting (though I'd still not be able to recover any of the comments that were just text comments - but I'd live with that). I've tried recording a Macro while going through the process, but was unsuccessful. I've set up the column that would contain the images with a blank comment in each cell adjusted to the proper size.  So all I need to automate (after selecting the cell to work on) is:

    Right-Click

    choose Edit Comment

    Right-Click (within the crosshatches)

    choose Format Comment

    click Colors and Lines

    click Color

    click Fill Effects

    click Picture

    click Select Picture (it remembers the most recent path to where my .jpgs are)

    type in the file name (which is in another cell on the same row in my spreadsheet) and add ".jpg"

    Return

    click OK

    click OK

    and I'm done - move onto the next cell in that column and repeat

    Can I somehow automate that?

    Otherwise, I'd be glad to share the workbook. How do I get it to you? I don't see where I can attach it in here.

    Thank you and anybody else so much for looking at this.

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