Office 365 iOS App Corrupted Excel File

I recently edited an excel file on iCloud from my iPhone. The next time I tried to open it, I received a message indicating that the file was corrupt. I've tried all of the suggestions provided in this forum as well as several online excel file repair tools. NONE of these worked - file is still corrupt. This file has 2 years of critical data that is now apparently gone. It's very concerning to see that this is apparently a known issue that has been happening for a long time, has affected many people, and yet, there is still no resolution (at least that I could find). I'd like to hear directly from Microsoft as to what the root cause of this issue is and why there isn't a resolution yet? Or if there is a resolution, what is it?

I had the same issue. corrupted excel file 66kb.

downloaded Numbers, tried to open the file.

gives same error message, corrupt file but then gives message about changes not synced and gets a few old versions. lets you choose which version to keep. timestamp only goes dd-mm--yy hh-mm and I had only 3 versions to restore.

all incomplete, some very old, some workbooks lost. but at least you manage to recover something.

then you can save the file and convert back to excel.

at least something.

thanks for the heads up.

definetly some file management issue between icloud and office365.

It seems as though either Apple or MS or 365 has thrown us users to the wolves, neither seems to want to fix this issue. Every day I use my files (on iPad Pro) and every day I half expect an issue. I don’t even have aWindows computer any longer. It should not be this way. Though it’s always wise to keep backups, why should I have to send files to Numbers, or email some point-in-time version to myself because it might disappear. Again. My 365 subscription will need to renew in a few months and then I’ll ask myself next steps.

OK, so it solved itself on my machine.

After opening up an excel document on the IOS version of excel, it saved it to 66kb and made it an Open XML document vs excel after I made one slight edit.

It was saved to iCloud overwriting the xlsx extension I had originally on the file (which normally I only edit on my Mac).

I read on another post that someone solved the issue by using Numbers to open the file. So I opened the corrupt file (from iCloud folder) in Numbers and then chose 'Revert to'. It somehow found the version I had previously in a Cloud cache file from the day prior (which was the copy I had made the last edit) and it opened fine in Numbers. I then exported to an Excel file and placed it in the same iCloud folder as the original file (with a different name - I appended 'fixed version' to the filename).

Now I can open that file in Excel....but here's where it got interesting. After opening that file, I was given a warning about opening the file and I ignored the error and it opened fine. But then I went back to the old 'corrupt' file (which I renamed back to an xslx extension) and that version opened with the slight edit I had made yesterday.

So, not sure what bug this is in excel but after going through that exchange, I can open both the repaired/fixed file and the original file which is no longer corrupt. Until they sort out this mess, I won't open anything in IOS.

I want to thank you very much for this clear explanation. I had the exact same issue where my Excel file got reduced to 66Kb after editing it on my iPad and saving on iCloud. It became "corrupted". Hopefully, I was able to save the file using Numbers the way you described it so eloquently. Kudos to you!

Ok, so after about 5 hours of trying various things, this is what actually worked! Thank you so much, I was so gutted when I thought I lost my file!

The bit I was stuck on was getting Numbers to revert to a previous version of the file, as it kept crashing when I tried that. So then I deleted the Numbers app and reinstalled it, and I could then recover the old version of the file and save it.

This was the definitive answer to the problem! I also deleted and reinstalled Numbers and used this approach. For months I’ve had problems with Word and Excel [MS 365 versions] on iPad corrupting files when saving to iCloud. I hope MSFT and/or Apple fix this, but if you run into the issue, this is the path to recovery.