How To Solve “The file is corrupt and cannot be opened” in Microsoft Office?

We all have used Microsoft Office Setup and no matter what field of business we work in,

Excel is an absolute necessity. It is a part of the very successful Microsoft Office com setup

suite which gets regular updates every year. Of course, Microsoft never disappoints when it

comes to new updates of Microsoft Office but there have often been small bugs reported

when users updated from an older version to the newer one.

When Microsoft launches a new version of MS Excel in MS Office then also provides a strong
solution for many errors through KBs. Sometimes it becomes very confusing to fix some
errors then user follows hit and trial option to fix them.

With the new Microsoft Excel 2010 and above versions, it was reported that the application
throws an error when an Excel file that was created by an older version of Microsoft Excel is
opened.

After upgrading from Microsoft Excel 2007 to 2010, the application throws the following
error when a file created in Excel 2007 or an older version is opened in the 2010 version.

“The file is corrupt and cannot be opened”

Now, the first reaction to this message is always panic. You always fear that all your
important data has been corrupted and deleted. But, though Microsoft Excel states if your
file is corrupted then it is not really lost and you can definitely try to recover it.
The important thing here is to focus on recovering the corrupted Excel files back anyhow.
Since we all know how much sensitive data is held by Excel files and one small corruption
could result in a lot of data loss.

Ways to resolve the Microsoft Excel Error

There are quite a few ways to resolve this particular Microsoft Excel Error,
these include both manual methods and using a third party tool.

Changing the Protected View Settings

When you upgrade to Microsoft Excel 2010, the Protected View settings are changed by
default. Most of the time, this is the problem why Excel throws the error.
This is what you need to do to change the settings back again-

1. Go over to the File Menu and click on Options
2. In the Options window, choose the last tab,Trusted Centre
3. Now click on ‘Trusted Center Settings’
4. In the new window, choose ‘Protected View’
5. Unchecked all the options available and click OK

After this, close the entire application and open it again. Though this should fix your problem, if it doesn’t, hope over to our next solution.

Changing Component Services Settings

Next way to get around this error is by changing Component Security Setting and
here is how you can do that-

1. Go over to the Search tab in the Start menu and type ‘dcomcnfg’
2. A new Component Services window with a three pane view will open
3. In the left-most pane, expand the Computers folder
4. Now, right click on My Computer and choose Properties
5. Choose the Default Properties tab on the new window
6. Tick mark the option ‘Enable Distributed COM on this computer’, set the value of ‘Default Authentication Level’ as ‘Connect’ and ‘Default Impersonation Level’ as ‘Identify’
7. Click on OK and restart Microsoft Excel

If the error still isn’t resolved by any of these methods or if these methods got you more
confused, then we strongly recommend to visit our website Office.com/Setup