Excel Recovery Stand Alone Version - Version 3.0 Microsoft recommends several methods for recovering Excel data from corrupt spreadsheets that won't open in this article: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/repairing-corrupted-files-in-excel-HA001034656.aspx. The external reference and the chart macro methods have not yet been implemented.Excel Recovery makes it easy to follow the recommendations to open your corrupt file in Word, setting calculations to manual, in the Excel Viewer, opening with open & repair and in safe mode. You first select the file, and then push one of six buttons which invokes those reported opening methods. The Open and Repair methods is split into two options, standard open and repair and open and extract data.