to be heartbroken over a spreadsheet?

[wanderingcloud]

Have spent the best part of the weekend, about 5hrs yesterday and from 10am til 5pm today, working on a spreadsheet for work that HAS to be ready for tomorrow morning. Just went to double check something after an email from on high and it won't open. Excel says there is a worksheet error and nothing. I'm not the most tech savvy person. I've resorted to snotty sobbing that my entire weekend has been for nought and I'm going to have to go in tomorrow with nothing to show for it. AIBU to cry over a spreadsheet?!

Does your company have an IT department?

Could you save the file to a pen drive and see if they can recover it?

Can you save a copy ( right click the file name) to a different location & see if that'll open?

Absolutely not! I feel exactly the same every time my computer has a breakdown and loses my work!

Technology is great but when it breaks it can be soul destroying.

I hope you manage to get it fixed, as Bogeyface said, maybe your companies IT department might be able to fix it?

Or open excel, go to file then open then see if it opens from the list of recent files?

Oh shit, OP, have you tried opening it with anoth programme? Open office calc? www.openoffice.org/download/index.html

Does excel save previous versions?
Is there a back-up point you can get to, instead of just trying to open the current one?
Can you try opening it on a different computer?

This might still be solvable.

Don't suppose you emailed an almost final draft to anyone?

Ok so it probably hasn't deliberately wiped the file and undone all your hard work, it's just that it won't open?

Can you save it and let IT have a look?

Tried opening from recent files and tried to open it on a different laptop. Will have to ask IT techs tomorrow and pray that they a) get into work early enough to help and b) can fix whatever it was that I did to screw it up. OH says I'm being a drama llama over it but I am devastated and mourning the loss of my precious weekend.

You should be able to restore a previous version in Windows explorer. I hope that works and it's not missing too much

Can you actually see the file? If you rename it (just add an x or something) it might work. What's the message when you try to open it?

When you shut down excel, did you auto-save, request to save on closing or just close? And did you save it to a local copy or from an email? If you find it locally, you can right click, copy and then rename something similar and request excel to open up the copy.

OP were you working from a records management system like TRIM? It might be possible to recover from a revision in that case.

Google-search the exact text from the error message and see what comes up. I have found solutions to lots of IT problems this way.

Good luck, we all know that awful feeling of hours of work going down the drain due to technology fail...

I wonder how much of a drama llama your "D"H would consider himself to be if it was him that had lost hours worth of work.......

Poor you OP, I feel your pain I had once just put the finishing touches onto a 2000 word essay for uni that I had been working on for ages. I then noticed I had left off the page numbers. To this day, I don't know what I did, but somehow in putting on the page numbers I deleted my essay I actually cried!!

If it says there is a worksheet error then it might be worth working through the steps listed here:

Repairing a corrupted workbook

This is for Excel 2010, so if you have a different version you'll need to look up the relevant version of the instructions.

For what it's worth in the future it might be worth using an online backup service (like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive) since these store a number of previous versions that you can restore (if you are saving the files in the linked folder on your hard drive so sync is automatically happening in the background).

OP - please tell us whether you managed to get it back! I have been feeling sorry for you since I saw this (although had nothing helpful in the way of advice to offer I'm afraid!).

Oh, also, if you just open Excel on it's own or with a different workbook is there a recovery pane in the right hand side of the window with your file there? Bit of a shot in the dark, but if Excel crashed or shut down unexpectedly then you never know.

Hope it you manage to get it sorted ok :)