How to make restoration of corrupted excel 2007 file?

Question

Hi there, 
When I open an excel file the following error message is displayed: “The file may be corrupted, located on a server that is not responding, or read only”.
Since this happened whenever I open any excel file, the above error message is again displayed, I must also mention that I am sure my files are not read-only and the files are stored on my hard disk and I use VM ware and my OS is windows server! 
How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

You may copy the file to another computer with Excel installed, and open it. If the error still exist, then your file is corrupt. Otherwise, there may be some problems with your Excel in the original computer and you need to uninstall/reinstall Excel.
If the file is corrupt, then you can try several methods to recover it:
1. First of all, you can try to repair the file manually in Excel, as follows:
(1) On the File menu, click Open.
 (2) In the Open dialog box, select the file you want to open, and click the arrow next to the Open button.
 (3) Click Open and Repair, and then choose which method you want to use to recover your workbook.
You may find more information about this at:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...001034656.aspx (for Excel 2003)
 http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...017.aspx?CTT=1 (for Excel 2007)
 http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...840.aspx?CTT=1 (for Excel 2010)
 http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...554.aspx?CTT=1 (for Excel 2013)
2. If method 1 fails, there are still several methods to recover your Excel file manually with Excel, including writing a small VBA macro, as below
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...#_Toc337637262
3. Third, there are also free tools from third-parties that can open and read Microsoft Excel files, for example,
3.1 OpenOffice at http://www.openoffice.org. This is a very famous open source project that is designed to support Office file formats, including Excel files. The software can run under Windows.
3.2 KingSoft Spreadsheets at
http://www.kingsoftstore.com/office/free-excel. This is a free Windows tool that can open Excel files.
3.3 Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/ also support to load Excel files.
Sometimes when Excel fails to open your file, these tools may be able to open it successfully. If that is the case, then after the Excel file is opened, you can just save it as a new file which will be error-free.
4. For xlsx files, they are actually a group of files compressed in Zip file format. Therefore, sometimes, if the corruption is only caused by the Zip file, then you can use Zip repair tools such as WinRAR at
http://www.rarlab.com to repair the file, as follows:
4.1 Assuming the corrupt Excel file is a.xlsx, then you need to rename it to a.zip
4.2 Start WinRAR, go to "Tools > Repair Archive" to repair a.zip and generated a fixed file a_fixed.zip.
4.3 Rename a_fixed.zip back to a_fixed.xlsx
4.4 Using Excel to open a_fixed.xlsx.
There may still be some warnings when opening the fixed file in Excel, just let ignore it and Excel will try to open and repair the fixed file. If the file can be opened successfully, then you can just save the contents into another error-free file.
5. If all above methods do not work, then you may try third-party tools such as DataNumen Excel Repair at
http://www.datanumen.com/excel-repair/
I have used it to recover some Excel files successfully. It provides a free demo version so that you can try to see if the data you want can be recovered or not.
Good luck!