Best Excel repair/recovery software?

[MobileTechie]

I've recovered some data for a customer who restore an OS over their data. It's a mix of pdf, Word and Excel files. Some of the Excel files have come back corrupted and the automatic repair doesn't fix it. For some reason it's just the Excel files, the pdf and Word files are all fine despite being in the same location.

I've tried a couple of the trial version of Excel recovery apps and they don't seem to do much to be honest. I've tried: Repair My Excel, Recovery Toolbox for Excel and AER. They all appear to go through the same 3 stages and don't do any more than Excel's own repair.

Any suggestions?

I see the HDD Regen people do XLS Regen but I can't even work out what it's supposed to be doing.

[dannyd]

ontrack easyrecovery professional should be able to do it, let me know if you don't have a copy, i will do it for you if you don't mind emailing them over.

[ZenTree]

I know it sounds stupid but try open office. We had word files that no program could recover apparently, tried open office on a whim and it opened up and dealt okay with the small errors.

Bar that there are some programs that can try to retrieve some of the data from excel files, rather than the files themselves. I've never had to use it but have it on a thumb drive somewhere if you want it?

[coco3_man]

I 2nd trying Open Office to open them. If it work, then do a Save As to write it to a new file. It won't be perfect so the customer may have to fix a few things.

Now is the golden opportunity to sell some backups services to "ease the pain" next time around.

Tom

[arrow_runner]

As a last resort you could try a hex editor. If nothing else you can open the file and make an attempt to compare it to a good xls file and repair the header or move the 'contents' to overwrite the contents of a good xls file.

I'd be willing to take a crack at it if you find nothing else. Good luck.

[Vicenarian]

glad581 is a spammer; reported

************************