Restoration of excel file is unreadable

I used Restoration to recover an excel file I had deleted from the recycle bin. I can open it with excel, however it appears to be in ASCII or something totally unreadable. Is there a way to restore it to useable form?

 

May depend on your office version. See this article;
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA010346561033.aspx
:wave

 

This is very common with recovered files: when the bin is emptied, the file 'header' is the only part of the file that is actually removed (well- it's not even removed, but it's changed to tell Windows that the space once occupied by the file is now free for use). When you recover the file, it is recovered with the 'modified' header, this is one reason why many companies charge top dollar for data recovery. You can try using a different data recovery program, check the Data Recovery section here at MajorGeeks, there's many good free programs there that might work better. You can also Google search for "Excel file recovery" or something similar. I remember finding a free Excel/Word/PowerPoint recovery program over a year ago, but I never used it and I have no idea what it was called, sorry.... I've had fairly good luck with this: http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm but it's a bit slow and not very user friendly....