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Help! Mathcad wont recognize any of my old files

ptc-5495745
1-Newbie

Help! Mathcad wont recognize any of my old files

Ive been using Mathcad15 as Im familar with the interface. My company had a mathcad spreadsheet which we used every 3-4 months as needed. I used it 3 months ago and it worked perfectly.

Now, I cannot open any of our spreadsheets in mathcad. I get the error :The requested file is not a valid Mathcad XML worksheet."

We have been using these worksheets for years and they have always opened. We havent done anything different in Mathcad. Any ideas?

5 REPLIES 5

I don't think we can tell whats the matter from that description. If possible you might post the worksheet in question to see if others can open it.

Best guess is that the last time the sheet was used it was saved and something went wrong and the file got corrupted. Any backup you have access to?

None of our worksheets will open. We have 6 of them. I even tried to open up all our backups and none of them would open. I tried 12 worksheets in total and we all received the same message. Some of them have not been re-saved in over a year so I dont think there was an error the last time all of the sheets were saved.

How do I post a worksheet? I cant find that anywhere.

How do I post a worksheet? I cant find that anywhere.

When you post you see "Use advanced editor" in the upper right of the window. Chose this option und you get the possibility to attach files at the end.

PS: I quite often came across corrupted worksheets but I can't remember that a Mathcad installation was damaged in such a way that it would open and run normally but won't open any worksheet.

Can you use Mathcad normally otherwise? I mean can you create a new sheet, save it and are you able to open it again after saving?

I can use it normally. It opens fine and I can create a worksheet and save it. Then when I open the newly created and saved worksheet, it opens fine.

Attached is one of my worksheets.

The file is definitely corrupted. Its size is 166093 bytes, but every single byte is just a zero. Thats also the reason why it compressed that small - the zip you posted is just 364 bytes.

Its hard to say how the file was damaged but from my experience I can tell that if Mathcad damages a file during saving (which happens from time to time) it usually end up with a very small or even zero byte file.

So I guess the reason is an error on the storage medium.

As there is no information in this file there is nothing to recover. Hope you have access to a backup.

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