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Restore Data From Corrupt Excel And Word Documents

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:21:45 +0000

It is sometimes not possible to load Excel or Word documents into Microsoft Office or alternative Office programs due to corruption. The only options available at this point is to open them in a plain text editor or program that is specialized to recover the data contained in these documents.

Damaged Docx 2 Txt and Corrupt Xlsx 2 Csv are two portable software programs for the Windows operating system that can recover data from corrupt Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 documents. The programs require the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. Both programs have been developed by the same software developer and work therefor similar. The user has to load a Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word document into the program in the first step. This can take a while depending on the size and complexity of the document.

All accessible worksheets or pages will be displayed in the program’s interface after the document has been analyzed by the software program.

The data of one or all Excel worksheets can then be exported into a Csv file. A similar process is applied to Word documents which can be exported into the Txt format. Both programs only work with the Office 2007 Word and Excel formats and not the former standard formats. They can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

How To Open Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets Without Excel

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:22:20 +0000

There are quite a few ways of opening Microsoft Excel spreadsheets if Microsoft Excel is not installed on the computer system. The article will outline several popular ways of opening Excel spreadsheets so that the contents can be at least read and printed. Several of the methods even allow to work with the contents of the spreadsheets as well.

All ways of opening Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can be divided into an online and offline category. The online category usually requires an account at some website before the spreadsheets can be worked with.

Computer Software Programs:

Excel Viewer [link]

Microsoft’s own Excel Viewer can be used to view Excel 2007 (xlsx) and earlier Excel spreadsheets. It has a download size of 74 Megabytes and uses the same core that Microsoft Excel uses which ensures a good compatibility with all Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Open Office [link]

Open Office is considered to be the Microsoft Office alternative. It is a free Open Source office suite that can be used to open Microsoft Office document formats. The module needed to open Excel spreadsheets is called Calc and supports the new Excel 2007 xlsx format but also older Microsoft Excel documents.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack [link]

Users who have a previous version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Excel installed (that is pre-Excel 2007) can use the Microsoft Office compatibility pack to add support for the Excel xlsx format so that these spreadsheets can also be worked with in previous versions of Excel.

XLS Viewer 2.30 [link]

The XLS Viewer has a tiny size of just 1 Megabyte. It can open, display and print xls, xlsx and ods documents that have been created with Microsoft Office or Open Office. The computer program seems to have slight problems displaying complex spreadsheets correctly.

Online Tools

Google Docs [link]

Google Docs has only recently added support for the Excel 2007 xlsx format. The online service was able to work with standard xls documents before but the new feature makes it possible to open and work with all Excel documents in Google Docs.

Thinkfree [link]

Can be used to quickly view spreadsheets online.Supports both old and new Excel spreadsheets and various other formats.

Zoho Sheets [link]

Zoho Sheets is an online product that enables users to view and edit spreadsheets online.

Do you know of other online or offline tools that can be used to view spreadsheets? Let us know in the comments.

Google Docs Adds Docx And Xlsx Support

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:34:55 +0000

Microsoft’s decision to change the default file format in Office 2007 for some of its most popular Office programs has caused some confusion and controversy, especially shortly after introduction. Back then no one was able to open the docx, xlsx or pptx file formats if they would not have Microsoft Office installed. This changed quickly as Microsoft released the Office 2007 compatibility suite for previous installments of Microsoft Office. Users without Microsoft Office were able to work with the new formats in Open Office or use online converters to convert them to traditional Office documents.

The Google Docs team on the other hand was reserved and did not add support for these file formats until now. Today, they announced that they finally added support for both the docx (that is for Microsoft Word 2007 documents) and xlsx (Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheets) format in Google Docs.

Support in this case means that users can upload files with the docx and xlsx extension to Google Docs. The size limitations are 500 Kilobytes for docx documents and 1 Megabyte for xlsx spreadsheets.

The document can then be edited in Google Docs just like any other document. There is however no option to save documents to a local computer system in the docx or xlsx format yet. Google Docs will automatically convert the documents to doc or xls format.

Docx And Xlsx Data Recovery Software

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:52:08 +0000

Dealing with corrupted Word documents or Excel spreadsheets especially without access to backups of those documents either because they have not been created in first place or because they are inaccessible in the current location. The only way to deal with corrupted documents is data recovery software. Docx2txt and Xlsx2csv have been specifically created to recover data from corrupted Microsoft Office 2007 Word and Excel documents that have been saved in the new docx and xlsx formats.

Both data recovery tools are portable programs that can be executed after unpacking them. The interface looks similar in both applications. It offers options to load and save docx and xlsx files. It will analyze the selected document and try to recover its text and values. The recovered document will then be displayed in the interface of the programs. The displayed data can be edited right away or saved as txt or csv files for further editing in programs that are better suited for editing the data.

The main advantage of both Docx2txt and Xlsx2csv is that they can easily be put on a DVD or USB stick to have them nearby when all other means of recovering the data of docx or xlsx documents fails. Docx2txt and Xlsx2csv (via Addictive Tips) have a size of less than 4 Megabytes each and can be directly downloaded from the developers webpage. They are compatible with all Microsoft NT based operating systems since Windows 2000 including Windows XP and Windows Vista. They also require the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0.

Google Docs Adds Office Excel 2007 XLSX Support

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:04:15 +0000

While Google Mail (Gmail) is already able to process Office 2007 file formats such as xlsx, docx or pptx by converting them to html format so that they can be viewed online Google Docs could not until now. This is kinda strange as one would think that Google Docs would be the primary application to display the Office XML formats. Google’s priority seemed to have been different. The developers have finally started to begin adding support for the new Office 2007 file formats beginning with the Excel 2007 format xlsx.

Not all pages have been updated in Google Docs with the information about the added Excel 2007 xlsx support. The upload page for example is not listing the new format as supported. The two other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats, that is Word 2007 with docx and PowerPoint 2007 with pptx, are not yet supported but it is very likely that the Google Docs team will add support for those file formats eventually.

The data transfer of the xlsx files produces good but not excellent results. The color highlighting of a test Excel 2007 file was for example not displayed on the Google Docs page of the document. The main information on the other hand were all displayed the way they looked in the real Office Excel document.