MS Excel is a very useful application which comes with the MS Office suit. In Excel 2007 and its earlier versions, the .xls file extension was used. However, Excel 2007 uses the new Office open XML format and .xlsx extension for saving workbooks.

Let us consider the following scenario in which you are trying to open Excel spreadsheet and encounters the following error message:

“This file is not in a recognizable format”

Causes:

After getting this error, if you will try to open the damaged file in notepad or word, you will get a gibberish representation of the Excel contents. Excel file not in a recognizable format error mainly occurs due to excel corruption. Excel corruption occurs due to application faults, virus attacks, network issues, improper system shutdown etc. Besides corruption of Excel files, you will also get this error if you will open MicroSoft works 4.0 or 3.0 files in Excel as MS Excel does not support the opening of MicroSoft works 4.0 and 3.0 files in it.

How to fix ‘Excel file not in a recognizable format’ error:

Opening the Excel file with the help of ‘Open and Repair’ feature of Excel and saving it in a different format may help you resolve the error. You can also try by opening the file on a different computer. If you are having a valid backup, you can delete the damaged Excel file and restore it by using the backup data.

          

If all these methods prove ineffective to overcome the problem, you can take the help of effective third-party Excel repair applications to repair Excel spreadsheets. These third-party applications uses advanced scanning techniques to overcome Excel corruption and fix ‘Excel file not in a recognizable format’ excel error. It can repair Excel files of almost all versions like 2007, 2000, 2003 and 2002 and has the capacity to restore different types of Excel objects like functions, images, charts, macros and functions. Since these applications are built with extremely user-friendly and interactive interface, so procedures to repair corrupted Excel files become easy to understand and perform.