Repairing a Corrupt Dashboard XLF

[Former Member]

If you build dashboards you know to save and version your XLF projects often.

But what happens when you open up an important SAP Dashboards / Xcelsius dashboard only to have it crash on startup?

The good news is you are not doomed. If you are like me and run a lot of programs at once and have frequent crashes, it is plausable for your Excel file to go corrupt. The fix is actually pretty simple...

Step1: Open the XLF file as a Zip

You will want to convert the .XLF to a .ZIP.

If Windows is not configured to show file extensions, you may need to enable that. Here is a tutorial that explains how to do it.

Step 2: Extract and Open the source Excel

Inside of your zip, you will see an xldoc file. This is a copy of your Excel file. Extract this file and either change the file name to xldoc.xls or right click and open the file with Excel.

Step 3: Let Excel repair itself and then re-save.

If there is a major problem with the Excel, it will likely notify you.

Step 4: Inject the Excel back into your zip and rename it back to .XLF

Remove the .xls extension and re-copy the file back into the zip. Then you will change the zip extension back to XLF.

Step 5: Re-open your dashboard in SAP Dashboards and hope for the best.

If your XML file goes bad, you are dead in the water. The next best thing that you can do is extract the Excel, re-import it into a new dashboard project and re-add your components and data connections.