Excel Recovery Add-In Files

		                    ****Excel Recovery Add-In 1.0 Beta****

Update: It is probably wise to try to do a zip repair step on corrupt xlsx files as a first step before trying to invoke other methods. 

This is the Add-in version of Excel Recovery which is also available on SourceForge. The add-in is more sophisticated and mature than the stand-alone product.  It was coded by Sergey Zhebka under contract through vWorker.  He did a great job.  He is available to do other VB.NET MS Office coding.

The add-in also has a link to the commercial ExcelFix which may be needed on some occasions to extract uselful information from a corrupt file. This present add-in requires Windows XP or greater, .NET 2.0 or later and Excel 2003 or later.

Excel Recovery is a program that tries to make easy, Microsoft's methods for recovering from Excel corruption. With the exception of the graph macro recovery, open in Word (which is no longer available) and the revert to last saved methods, it implements in one place all the suggestions for Excel recovery laid out by Microsoft at these locations: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/repairing-corrupted-files-in-excel-HA001034656.aspx and http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/repairing-a-corrupted-workbook-HA010097017.aspx.

The program adds three non-MS methods of its own for recovering data from corrupt workbooks that won't open. These are the "Non-MS Extract I", "Non-MS Extract II-XLSX Only" and the "Zip Repair-Try for XLS & XLSX" methods which all use included freeware or open source executables from other projects to do their work, specifically the doctotext, no-frills, coffec and zip projects. All the projects except coffec are available on Sourceforge. The "Non-MS Extract I" method uses SilverCoder's DocToText project: http://silvercoders.com/en/products/doctotext/ to do its back end work. 

It also adds the ability to recover previous versions of the file stored in the Windows System Restore snapshots. Even though inividual files are not normally available to Vista Basic and Premium Home OS users, this program exposes them and makes them available. The previous versions of files is available to any Windows Vista and 7 OS users. The "restore previous versions" is available anyway to Vista business version and all Windows 7 version on the Explorer context/right click menu even without this program. Excel Recovery might make this feature easier to use for bulk operations.

There is an earlier version of the stand-alone program still available also on Sourceforge.

This program requires the installation of the .NET 2.0 framework. Hopefully most Windows machines have at least installed this version by now. Additionally, most of the functions require at least Excel 2003 to be installed on the machine. This is Beta software, please send me your reports of bugs to socrtwo@s2services.com.

For any suggestions and free support please Email me at socrtwo@s2services.com. I also try manual spreadsheet recovery for $22 but charge only for success. - 01/14/2012 Paul Pruitt