I did a careless mass delete on my downloads folder a couple days ago, and I'm trying to recover a single Excel file that was among the deleted files. With a file recovery program, I found 2 versions of it that, according to the recovery program, are in "Excellent" state, with "No overwritten clusters detected". But when I recover either one of those files and try to open them in Excel, I get the following error message:
"Excel cannot open the file "filename.xlsx" because the file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been curropted and that the file extension matches the format of the file."
I've tried a couple different techniques, including:
- Renaming to .zip, then unzipping with 7zip (results in a "file is not an archive" error)
- Using an Excel recovery tool (none of the 2 I've tried have been able to recover the file)
- Using Excel's built in recovery tool (tells me that it can't recover the file).
All I need to be able to do is view 2 columns of data, even if it's in plain text or coded, but I can't seem to get it to open in anything. Any ideas?