johnmbl

Due to the unwanted presence of some icons on the bottom of my spreadsheet after copying & pasting 800 names and emails into it, I selected and saved from A1 to N810 and pasted it into a new Excel page, omitting the unwanted icons, then deleted the original.

Now the pasted new spreadsheet seems to be an image inside an outline box preventing me from working on it. Is there a way to recover this as a workable spreadsheet?

Feel really dumb!

gistek

First of all, is the original actually deleted or is it still sitting in your recycle bin? If it's still in your bin, you can restore it.

If not:

Can you select the text within the "image?" If so, you might be able to copy it to notebook then import it to another spreadsheet. You'll probably have a bit of formatting and re-arranging to straighten it out, but that's better than having to re-type everything.

If the text isn't selectable, you might be able to salvage the project with an optical character recognition (OCR) application. This will create a file with text that can then be imported. As with the first option, you will probably have to do a bit of fix-up work. It will also have to be carefully proofread as many times OCR's misinterpret characters.

johnmbl

Hey Gistek...thanks for the post and your suggestions appreciated. U r right to point out the obvious first, but no....the deletion of the original spreadsheet was total! Only after left clicking for a contextual menu and selecting Grouping>Ungroup did I get find that I'd somehow pasted an "imported object" which couldn't be ungrouped, but I used the option to convert to an MS Drawing Object. I was then able to highlight/copy/paste each individual cell to a fresh spreadsheet. Slow task and I did try the OCR route you suggested after doing a printout then scan, but the first option was quicker in the end. Lord knows how simply doing a drag to highlight, copy and paste from one spreadsheet page to another resulted in changing status to an unusable "imported object"....I'll never again delete a file before checking the replacement first! Thanks again though.

gistek

Instead of deleting, invest in an external hard drive and use it to keep archive copies of files. One way is to create subdirectories with dates as their names. I use the YYYYMMDD format so they sort chronologically. Any files you no longer use, but might need to roll back to go in the directory for that day (week or month works, too). Then when the external starts getting full, copy the oldest subdirectories to CD (or DVD) and free up that space on your external drive.