Excel opens the file and announces that it is unreadable, or it opens nothing at all. Before buying repair software, four things cost nothing and settle most cases.
First, is it corrupted or simply unsaved?
These are different problems with different answers, and the distinction saves a lot of wasted effort.
Corrupted means the file exists and its contents are damaged. Unsaved means the file you are looking for was never written to disk, usually after a crash or a closed prompt. If that is your situation, the recovery path runs through AutoRecover and the temporary folder instead, which we cover in recovering an unsaved Excel file.
There is a third case worth naming because it looks like corruption and is not: a file of 0 bytes. Nothing was ever written, so there is nothing to repair. That one is a recovery question, not a repair question.
The fastest free fix is usually a previous version
People reach for repair tools before checking whether an intact copy already exists, and it very often does.
If the workbook lives in OneDrive or SharePoint, open the file's version history in the web interface and restore the last version that opened cleanly. On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties and then Previous Versions, which lists restore points and File History copies if either is enabled.
This takes thirty seconds and returns a genuinely undamaged file rather than a partial reconstruction. Try it before anything else.
Excel's own Open and Repair, and the fallback most people miss
Excel ships with a repair routine that is not on the main menu.
Open Excel first, empty, then File and Open. Select the damaged workbook but do not double-click it: click the small arrow beside the Open button and choose Open and Repair. Excel offers Repair, which tries to keep formulas and formatting, and if that fails it offers Extract Data, which pulls out values and drops everything else.
Extract Data is the option people skip because it sounds like a defeat. It often is not. Getting the numbers back as values, without formulas, is usually far better than getting nothing, and it is frequently the step that works when Repair does not.
Two settings help before you try. Set calculation to manual under Formulas and Calculation Options so that opening the file does not immediately trigger a recalculation that crashes it again, and start Excel in safe mode with excel /safe so that no add-in interferes.
An .xlsx is a ZIP archive, and that changes what is possible
This is the part that turns a dead end into an inspection, and almost nobody tries it.
Since the OOXML format, an .xlsx file is a ZIP container holding XML parts. Copy the file, rename the copy to .zip, and open it with any archive tool. Inside you will find xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml and its siblings, plus xl/sharedStrings.xml which holds the text.
What that tells you is worth the two minutes. If the archive opens and the sheet XML is readable, your data is intact and the problem is in the container or in a part Excel needs to start. If the archive itself refuses to open, the damage is in the ZIP structure, and a ZIP repair tool sometimes rebuilds enough of the central directory to make the file loadable again.
Even in the worst case, an open archive means you can read the values out of the XML by hand. It is tedious and it is not elegant, but a readable sheet1.xml means the figures are not lost.
LibreOffice Calc opens files Excel refuses
LibreOffice is more tolerant of malformed OOXML than Excel is, and it costs nothing to try.
Install it, open the damaged workbook, and if it loads, save immediately to a new file. Recovering a workbook this way sometimes loses macros or an exotic chart type, but the sheet data and the formulas usually survive. When Excel says the file is unreadable and LibreOffice opens it without complaint, the file was never really destroyed.
What no tool can do, and what online repair really costs
Be clear about the limit. If the bytes that held your cells were overwritten, no repair tool reconstructs them. Software can only rebuild structure around data that is still on the disk; it cannot invent content that is gone. Any product promising otherwise is selling a hope.
There is also a cost to the convenient option. Online repair services require you to upload the workbook, which for a spreadsheet containing salaries, client lists or forecasts means handing business data to a third party you have not audited. For anything confidential, that alone rules them out, whatever the success rate.
If the file is not damaged but missing
Everything above assumes the file is still there. If the workbook was deleted, or the drive was formatted, or a folder vanished, repair is the wrong tool entirely and you want recovery instead, which searches the device for data whose directory entry is gone.
The same distinction applies to the other formats in this series: a corrupted PDF and a corrupted JPEG both have their own structure-specific tricks, and both share this one rule. Repair works on files that exist. Recovery works on files that do not.
If the file is gone rather than damaged → EaseUS Data Recovery
Repair only helps when the file still exists. If the workbook was deleted or the drive was formatted, that is a recovery job instead. Free scan to see what is still there, and install it on a different drive than the one you are recovering.
Recover the data from your hard drive → EaseUS
Free scan · deleted, formatted & lost files · Windows & Mac
