Regardiing recovering your crashed workbook (assumming you
don't create backups), I recently had to reover a trashed
workbook. I created a new workbook and linked cells from
the new workbook to the equivalent cells in the broken
workbook. You don't have to open the broken workbook for
this to work. I had some cleaning up to do, but most of my
data was recovered. I can't remember the exact syntax of
the formulas to use, but it was something like:
='C:\[BrokenWB.xls]SheetName1'!A1, etc.