The original file

The original file contains a list of employees, extension numbers and departments:

Viewing "Lost strings"

The file results are corrupted and cannot be opened with MS Excel. We recover it with ExcelFIX and when we view it we find that the text cells show only the label "[Lost string]" and the original text has been lost. This means that the MS Excel text listing has been corrupted and either the texts have lost their reference system or the texts have been completely destroyed:

Binding the text listing

The next step is to click on the menu "Options/Lost strings". This will show the lost strings wizard, which allows you to search for lost strings inside or outside the file. Once the search is completed click on "Bind" to go to the "Bind editor".

Since the numeric cells cannot be affected by a lost string corruption we easily recognize the column for "Extension" and we can assume that the text on the top of the column "C1" must be the text "Extension".

We find the text "Extension" in the listing, manually or using the "Search for text" operation, and we select the text. Also, we select the corresponding cell on the right, the cell "D1".

All is ready to click on the [Bind] button. The reference numbers will be assigned to the texts, and every "lost string" cell in the viewer will be replaced with its corresponding text:

Checking the binding

Before we continue it is very important to check that we have bound the listing correctly. We can do so by double clicking on several texts in the listing: automatically the worksheet viewer will select the first cell bound to each text.

If a text is bound to different cells, each time that we double click on it, the next bound cell will be selected:

Recovery completed

In some occasions the text listing can be broken up into several blocks of texts with horizontal black lines. This means that different blocks of contiguous texts were found in different places. You should repeat the steps above for each block.

The work is done: we can apply the changes in the "Bind Editor" and save the file.