Excel says 'we found a problem with some content' / 'unreadable content' when opening a file downloaded from Google Sheets; charts or formulas removed after repair

What's actually wrong

Google Sheets' .xlsx exporter sometimes writes files that Sheets accepts but Excel's stricter parser flags — the documented repeat offenders are embedded charts and Sheets-only functions (QUERY, GOOGLEFINANCE, ARRAYFORMULA, IMPORTRANGE) that have no Excel equivalent, so they export as broken formula XML that Excel then strips during repair. Your cell values almost always survive the repair; what you lose is the chart or the live formula. Very large sheets can also fail or truncate during download, which produces a genuinely broken ZIP.

Free fixes — try these first

1. Let Excel repair and read the log. Usually only a chart part or specific formulas were removed — verify the data sheets are complete, recreate the chart in Excel (a few minutes), and Save As a new name.
2. Export a values-only copy: in Google Sheets, File → Make a copy; in the copy select all (Ctrl+A) → Copy → Edit → Paste special → Values only, delete or screenshot charts, then File → Download → Microsoft Excel (.xlsx). This sidesteps every incompatible function.
3. Go via a different format: File → Download → OpenDocument (.ods) and open that in Excel, or open the problematic .xlsx in LibreOffice Calc and re-save as .xlsx — both writers produce XML Excel accepts.
4. For big sheets that fail to download: download tab-by-tab as CSV (File → Download → CSV per sheet), or split the spreadsheet into two copies with fewer tabs — Google's community threads confirm size-related export failures.
5. Re-download and compare file sizes — a truncated download over a flaky connection produces a corrupt ZIP; a second download is often simply fine.

If the free fixes fail

If the downloaded file won't open in Excel, LibreOffice, or even back in Google Sheets, the download itself was truncated or the export wrote a broken archive — and no amount of re-repairing in Excel will find data that needs manual ZIP-level recovery. Our analyzer verifies the archive structure, pulls the sheets that survived, and shows the recoverable percentage before you do anything else.