Microsoft recommends several methods for recovering Excel data from corrupt spreadsheets. Excel Recovery makes it easy to follow these recommendations for saving and reopening your file in the SYLK and HTML formats, opening the corrupt workbook with calculations to manual or in safe mode, opening in the Excel Viewer or WordPad, opening the file in open and repair or open and extract data modes, and using the external references method.
The professional level freeware Excel add-in also adds two methods of its own for data extraction and one for Excel repair using included command line apps. Finally it has its own native previous file version recovery tool which works where in any version of Vista and Windows 7.
Still to be added in a future version is the macro chart data recovery method.