Excel

Excel Shows ##### in Cells After Recovery

After recovering a damaged Excel file, you open it and find some or all numeric cells displaying ##### (or ####) instead of the values you expected. This is not data loss. The values are still there. Excel displays this pattern when a column is too narrow to fit the value it’s trying to show — and recovery typically resets column widths to their default. The fix takes seconds.

Quick fix

Auto-fit every column at once.

  1. Click the Select All button at the top-left corner of the sheet (the small grey square between row 1 and column A). Or press Ctrl+A twice — the first press selects the data region, the second selects the entire sheet.
  2. Move your cursor over the boundary line between any two column headers (between A and B, for example). The cursor changes to a double-headed arrow.
  3. Double-click that boundary.

Every column on the sheet auto-fits to the width of its widest content. The ##### displays disappear and you see the actual values.

If your workbook has multiple sheets and they all have this problem, repeat for each sheet — or use the VBA approach in the advanced section to handle them all at once.

If that didn’t work

Use the Format menu

If the double-click approach doesn’t work — sometimes it doesn’t on certain Excel versions or with merged cells in the way — use the menu equivalent:

  1. Press Ctrl+A twice to select the entire sheet.
  2. Go to the Home tab.
  3. In the Cells section, click Format.
  4. Choose AutoFit Column Width.

This produces the same result.

Check cell formatting for date misapplication

If auto-fitting widens the column but the value still shows as #####, or shows as a row of hash symbols filling the entire wider column, the cause is different. A cell formatted as a date but containing a numeric value larger than what the date format can represent — or a negative number formatted as a date — also displays as ##### regardless of column width.

To check:

  1. Click the affected cell.
  2. Look at the Number Format dropdown on the Home tab (in the Number section).
  3. If it shows Date, Long Date, Short Date, or Time, that’s the problem.
  4. Change it to General or Number to see the underlying value.

Recovered files sometimes lose number formatting and have date format applied to numeric columns by accident. The data is intact; the format just needs correcting.

Manual column resize for individual columns

For one or two specific columns rather than the whole sheet:

  1. Hover over the right edge of the column header you want to resize.
  2. Drag right to widen, or double-click to auto-fit just that column.

You can also right-click the column header, choose Column Width, and enter a specific value. The default Excel column width is 8.43 characters; recovered files often default to this. Numeric columns commonly need 12–15 to fit currency values with separators.

Advanced recovery

For workbooks with many sheets, manually repeating the auto-fit process is tedious. A short VBA macro auto-fits every column on every sheet in one run.

  1. Open the workbook.
  2. Press Alt+F11 to open the Visual Basic editor.
  3. Go to Insert > Module.
  4. Paste:
Sub AutoFitAllSheets()
    Dim ws As Worksheet
    For Each ws In ThisWorkbook.Worksheets
        ws.Cells.EntireColumn.AutoFit
    Next ws
End Sub
  1. Press F5 to run, or close the editor and run from Developer > Macros (you may need to enable the Developer tab via File > Options > Customize Ribbon).
  2. Save the workbook.

Every sheet’s columns auto-fit in one operation. You can delete the macro afterward, or save the workbook as .xlsm if you want to keep it for future recovery work.

Why this happens

The ##### display has nothing to do with data damage. It’s Excel’s signal that it cannot show a value in the available space. There are two underlying conditions that produce it.

Column too narrow for the value. When a numeric or date cell value can’t fit within the column’s display width at the current font size, Excel shows ##### rather than truncating the value or displaying it incorrectly. This is a deliberate design choice — truncation could mislead by displaying 12,345 when the actual value is 12,345,678. The hash pattern is unambiguous: it tells you the value is there but you can’t currently see it. Widening the column resolves it.

The reason this is so common after recovery is that Excel’s repair process and most third-party recovery tools rebuild the workbook with default column widths rather than preserving the original widths. Original widths are stored in the worksheet XML alongside the cell data, and if the part of the file containing width metadata was damaged, it may not survive recovery — even though the cell values themselves do.

Date format on a value that can’t be represented as a date. Excel dates are stored internally as days since 1900-01-01 (or 1904-01-01 on Mac, depending on the workbook setting). A numeric value that’s negative, or larger than the maximum representable date (around year 9999), can’t be displayed as a date even with infinite column width. The cell shows ##### until the format is changed to something the value can be displayed as.

Recovered workbooks occasionally lose number-format metadata and revert columns to a generic format that doesn’t match the underlying data type. Date columns in particular are vulnerable because date values are just numbers internally — once the date format is lost, Excel doesn’t know to apply it back.

Preventing this in future

Column widths are stored as part of the workbook structure. Files saved through standard Excel save paths preserve them reliably; widths only get lost when files go through aggressive recovery tools that rebuild the workbook from cell data alone.

If you’re recovering files frequently, prefer recovery methods that preserve formatting metadata where possible. Excel’s built-in Open and Repair preserves widths better than Extract Data. LibreOffice’s open-and-resave preserves widths well. Aggressive third-party recovery tools that “extract data” may not.

For backup discipline against future recovery, OneDrive or SharePoint version history preserves the entire workbook including column widths and formatting — making post-recovery formatting fixes unnecessary in most cases.

If recovery has produced other formatting or formula problems beyond column widths — #REF! errors in formulas, missing chart connections, broken pivot tables — see Excel formulas are broken or return #REF! after recovery. For the underlying causes of needing recovery in the first place, the Excel repair guide covers the broader landscape.

Last verified: April 2026