Please help recover data from corrupt file

Don't know what happened. Just all of a sudden I open up my file, which is for work and has a lot of data, and it was corrupt.

I'm currently going through all the steps I've found so far, like the office repair process, "open and repair", moving the file to a different location, reopening file after changing calculations to manual, linking to the corrupt workbook from another workbook... All failed.

The only other thing I've not tried that I've read about so far is installing some feature that will allow you to open it with Word. When I tried all characters were the same. Otherwise I read you can run a macro but I would leave that for last as I've zero experience with those but I'll do whatever it takes. I just need some pointers. Anyone? Thanks

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Here are some tips I collected from Forums on the NET:

RESTORE CORRUPT FILE

Restoring a Corrupted File
This is the reply from one of members re restoring a corrupted file

The techs at Microsoft were able to restore the Excel file!

I'm not sure what all they did (some of it was magic, evidently), but here's a tip they passed along.

If you're having a problem with an Excel file, save it as HTML (which is one of the file types in Excel), then save it back to .xls

They say that will often recover lost information, or restore a corrupt file.
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http://directory.s2services.com/excel.htm
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https://support.office.com/en-us/art...A-801DDCD4EA53
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Another way of restoring broken/corrupted Excel files
I've been quite lucky actually opening corrupted files in OpenOffice, saving them, and then re-opening them in Excel. Sometimes the formatting will be a little off, but the data is almost always recovered, as well as most of the formatting. Unfortunately, not all of the formula and charts are, but when it happened I was happy anything was salvaged at all :-)