Excel found unreadable content

Why it happens

• A workbook written by another program or a script that broke one of the format's rules.
• A transfer or save that stopped part-way.
• A part of the file overwritten with stray bytes, for example on a failing USB stick.

Try these first, they're free

1. 1If the file came from email or the web, right-click it, choose Properties, tick Unblock and press OK. Windows blocks downloaded files, and Excel then refuses to open them in ways that look like damage.
2. 2Check the file's size. A file of 0 KB holds nothing at all: no repair can bring it back, so look for another copy (the sender, OneDrive version history, a backup).
3. 3In Excel, choose File › Open, select the file, click the arrow next to Open and choose Open and Repair.

How we fix it

We repair the part that breaks the rules instead of dropping it, check the result against Microsoft's own Open XML validator, and show you the repaired workbook before you download it.

On 384 damaged Office files, we recovered 81% of the content; Office's own repair recovered 53%. See the benchmark.

Other messages

• Excel: “We found a problem with some content”
• Excel cannot open the file because the format or extension is not valid
• Excel: “The file format and extension don't match”
• “The file is corrupt and cannot be opened”