[Solved] Can't access a s/sheet ... ASCII/text dialog

[gm2fz]

hello ...
hope i'm not in the wrong forum area ... i have a calc problem thus i clicked 'calc'.

this only started about 10 days ago and is to do with ascii and text import etc., the result of which stopped me seeing the text that i'd originally entered appearing either as a blank page or lines and lines of #'s across and down the page.

to elaborate, when i usually want to access a file ... any file ... i click on the file in windows explorer and it appears on screen. this time, i clicked on an .xls file, an hour glass was added to the cursor, a couple of seconds passed, the h/glass vanished and it acted like the actual programme wasn't even installed.

so then i activated openoffice ... which was fine ... and clicked the open file icon on the toolbar and a window appeared with the title 'text import (plus the required file name + a couple of % characters) plus a choice of character sets. first was 'unicode' and then unicode(UTF-7 & separately UTF-8). the UTF-8 rang a bell so i clicked on that and again nothing happened.
then, can't exactly recall what happened but a small window ultimately appeared headed 'Ascii Filter Options' showing, amongst others, Windows Europe (Windows-1252/Win Latin 1) which, when clicked, gave a choice of CR & LF or CR or LF. when i clicked CR & LF, the file opened showing lines of #'s.

What i would like to happen is a return to normality ... when clicking a file via a shortcut or in windows explorer ... i am able to read the file.

would be grateful for any help please ...

[Zizi64]

Can you upload a problematic example spreadsheet file here?

[RoryOF]

Are all of your .xls files giving problems, or is it just one particular file?

[Hagar Delest]

the result of which stopped me seeing the text that i'd originally entered appearing either as a blank page or lines and lines of #'s across and down the page.

See: [Tutorial] The Dreaded Pound Signs: file reduced to ####.
Good luck.

I hope you had backups.

[gm2fz]

sample xls-05 for oo.jpg

sample xls-03 for oo.jpg

sample xls-021 for oo.jpg

sorry about the delay ... i was away till yesterday.

i replied to this sequence of posts about a couple of hours ago but can't see it anywhere so thought i'd re-type it again, that is, if i can remember what i typed in the first place.

so here goes ...

@Zizi64 ... yes, can do that i'll send 3. when i try to activate the file, it appears on screen as a blank spreadsheet but also on-screen, is a smaller window headed 'Test Import' and in the top centre is a field with 'Unicode' in it. i've followed 2 courses of action from this point ... i click on the unicode sub-menu, scroll to 'UTF-8' then 'OK' it. the window goes away and i'm left with the blank s/sheet. the second action is to ignore the sub-menu and go direct to 'X' at the top-right corner and clicked. both courses have the same result ... i'm left with the same blank screen. that's shown in 'sample xls-05 for oo.jpg'.

@RoryOF ... apart from one or two on and off, it happens to two particular spread sheets .

@Hagar Delest ... after clicking on the link and reading what was said, i downloaded the 'Shadow Explorer' but i didn't succeed in getting very far with it. I changed the settings and my 3 hard drives and the c:\folders & files came into view. with my d: and e: drives, only the drives and folders could be seen ... no files.
so i copied over the 2 files in question to the c: drive but neither of them could be seen so i could no further.

thank you for your thoughts.

[RoryOF]

If it is only happening on one or two files, the strong probability is that they are damaged. If so, experience shows that nothing useful will be recovered from those files. The only slight hope is that you may be able to recover temporary files used by the operating system. To attempt to recover temporary files download PhotoRec and allow it do an indepth recovery of any such files

[gm2fz]

well, the good news is that it appears that not only did i retrieve the data of the 2 spreadsheet files which were previously each only showing a blank page with other windows quoting strange characters but i also recovered a number of files from my 2000 gig.hd.

thank you for your advice about PhotoRec which i downloaded together with TestDisk. not too sure what happened after that because TestDisk appeared and i assumed that it was all part of the same programme. it worked from a command prompt and the various commands seemed quite easy. it took for ages though ... think about 7 or 8 hours by the time it'd finished but when it had, all my files were visible and able to be activated.

the 2 s/sheet files which i had attempted to run through the same process didn't 'seem' to produce any result but i must have done something right because the next morning when i turned on the computer, i could see the s/sheet content again.

thank you for putting me on to PhotoRec/TestDisk ... i'm sure i'll use it again.

i'll mark this topic as SOLVED