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Excel Tricks
26
Mar

Repairing Damaged Excel Workbooks
  • David H. Ringstrom, CPA
  • 3457
There is never a good time to encounter the prompt that informs you that the workbook you’ve opened is damaged and cannot be opened. When this happens, the first thing to do is stop and take a breath. All may not be lost with your file. In this article I’ll lay out a couple things to try before you give up. Y If you see this prompt, the first thing to do is to press Enter to accept the default choice of Repair, or else click Repair with your mouse. This often clears up many issues with Excel workbooks. In fact, I often use this process on files that are not necessarily outright corrupted, but feel like something isn’t right:Within Excel’s Open dialog box click on the workbook that you wish to repair.Click the arrow at the right of the Open button. Choose Open and Repair from the menu that appears.Click Repair from the prompt. 
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11
Mar

Clearing Numeric Input from an Excel Spreadsheet
  • Allen Smith, CPA
  • 2319
Erasing manual inputs from a spreadsheet that you want to reuse can be a tedious task. Despite our best intentions, entries often get saved into our master copies of spreadsheets that we reuse. Fortunately, you don’t have to go cell by cell to erase inputs. Specifically, we’re going to look at erasing numeric inputs, although you may be able to alter the technique to replace text-based inputs:Select the cells that contain the data you want to remove, which can include numeric inputs, text, and formulas. To select an entire worksheet, click the top left corner of the worksheet frame, otherwise manually select two or more cells.Activate Excel’s Home menu.Choose Find & Select.Choose Go To Special. Choose Constants.Clear the checkboxes for Text, Logical, and Errors, leaving only Numbers selected. Click OK. Press the Delete key to clear the cells but keep the formatting intact. If you wish to completely clear the cells, choose Clear and then Clear All on the Home menu instead.
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