Lost notes in Excel spreadsheet. How to recover them.

[mllesourire]

I use notes/comment in a very basic Excel 2007 desktop spreadsheet that I upload to dropbox for back-up.  For a few days I edited the spreadsheet directly in Excel online through Dropbox. When I downloaded the most recent version of my spreadsheet to my desktop, I lost all the notes that were in the cells. Not just the ones I added online, even the previous ones that I initially had on the desktop version. How can I recover them?

Thanks

[Megan]

Hey @mllesourire, welcome to Dropbox & sorry to hear about your missing content.

Assuming that there wasn’t an underlying syncing or connectivity issue, you can keep an eye out in the file’s activity by looking at the file Version History.

That way, you can locate when the edits were made & whether everything has been properly saved back on Dropbox. What do you see there? 

Also, do you have autosave working with your Excel, or did you save the content manually?

Let me know more!

[mllesourire]

Hello Megan, thanks for the ideas, but my online Excel spreadsheet in Dropbox is up to date, no problem there. My problen is when I download and save from Dropbox to my desktop, in Excel 2007. There’s an issue when I open the file, and no notes/comments appear in the cells although they are all present in the online version (on Dropbox)

[Jay]

Hi @mllesourire, since Dropbox doesn't amend your files without any user input, and the comments still appear on the site, it sounds like your local copy of Excel itself is possibly preventing the notes from being viewed.

Is this an xls or xlsx file you're previewing?

[mllesourire]

Hi @Jay it's an xlsx file.

I back tracked and tried again, I payed attention to the error message

(loosly translated): Parts were deleted in order to open the file by deleting or reparing content:

deleted part: part/xl/comments1.xml with error XML (comments) charging error line 2 colum 386. 

(3 error lines)

I have no clue how to repair or retreive this XML parts. I looked online, but this XML is internal to my file, not my own add on.

Really not my field of expertise...

Thanks

[Jay]

It sounds like this is a specific Excel error that is unrelated to Dropbox, since the Dropbox site is able to load the comments normally.

It's possible that the version of Excel 2007 might be too old to view the comments created on newer versions, if the certain parts are incompatible with Excel 2007.