Excel file corruption

[Kenneth Cohen]

I have a problem with Excel file corruption. I have a data list in an Excel
2004 file running under OS X 10.4.6. It currently contains 15 records each
having about 120 fields. We open a Word 2004 template containing merge
fields in the usual format: { MERGEFIELD Field_Name }, for example, where
Field_Name is one of the Excel data list fields. All Word merge fields
have been created using the Data Merge Manager in Word, so there is no
syntax issue.

Yesterday, some of the data in the last record of the Excel file failed to
appear in the Word document when a merge took place, but other data did
appear correctly. The data is definitely there, but Word doesn¹t see it and
so the merge field shows up blank in the Word document. I spent a lot of
time troubleshooting this and I¹m satisfied that the problem record in the
Excel file is partly corrupted. I fixed the problem by copying the entire
data list into a new Excel file.

Question: The Excel data file is going to become larger and more complex,
with more fields and many more records, I hope to be able to share it
eventually. Can I expect this kind of Excel file corruption to be a frequent
problem? And if so, is there any way to fix the corrupt file other than by
copying all the data into a new file and then trashing the old one?

Thanks for all replies.

Ken Cohen

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

Was there an empty cell in the list? An empty cell indicates the end of
the data.

-Jim

 

[work]

Hi,

Was there an empty cell in the list? An empty cell indicates the end of
the data.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
MVP FAQ
<http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;mvpfaqs>

 

[Kenneth Cohen]

Jim,

There are a number of empty cells throughout the list, but they don't have
any effect on other records. The problem cell in this record appeared empty
to Word's merge manager, but I could see the data in Excel, and I could copy
it into Textedit. I used a Word if-then-else statement to verify that Word
thought the cell was blank. I finally copied everything over to a new Excel
workbook and then Word could see the data.

But the trouble with copying the data list over is that the first row of the
data (the header row) loses all of its calculations, the data specification
for every column is changed from whatever it was (in many cases they were
calculated columns) to "any value". If this was just a freak bit of
corruption, I won't mind, but if it happens regularly, I'll be wasting a lot
of time redoing the column specs. It's a strange little problem.