🔒 Encrypted .ods file won't open – stuck loading forever, possibly corrupted (help needed)

Hello everyone,

I really need help. I’ve been working on a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet for several months and saved it as a password-protected .ods file on a USB flash drive.

Recently, when I try to open the file, it prompts me for the password (which I know is correct), but after entering it, the file never opens — it just keeps loading indefinitely. It doesn’t crash or throw an error, it just hangs.

After some research, I suspect the file may be corrupted. However, the file size appears unchanged, so I’m hoping that the content might still be recoverable.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

  • Opened it in LibreOffice Safe Mode → same result (just loads forever)
  • Tried OpenOffice → it says the file is corrupted and needs repair, then fails to repair it
  • Tried renaming the .ods file to .zip → but since it’s encrypted, I can’t access content.xml
  • Used a tool like Kernel for Calc (evaluation version) → no success or useful results
  • Tried uploading to Google Sheets or Excel → not supported due to password protection

At this point I don’t know what else to try. I don’t want to give up on this file — it represents months of work and the password is definitely correct.

Questions:

  1. Is there any known method to recover or repair password-protected .ods files that won’t open due to corruption?
  2. Can the community or any advanced user look at the structure of the file to confirm if it’s salvageable?
  3. Are there reliable tools or services (even paid) that are known to work with this kind of issue?

Any advice or guidance would be deeply appreciated. :pray:

I can try to look into it – only if you trust me (a random person offering you help on Internet), and send me the file together with the password. It is a serious risk on your side, trusting someone like that; but there is no way to decrypt the file without password (no we don’t create backdoors in LibreOffice encryption), and no way to try to extract XMLs without decrypting.

My personal suspicion is, that there is no corruption, just some bug in LibreOffice causing a hang; and maybe waiting long enough (who knows how long … hours?) could result in opening - or not. OOo (or AOO) reporting a corruption is likely a red herring caused by our new encryption scheme introduced recently, which is naturally not supported by that. By the way, you could try the versions between 24.2 and 25.8, to check if any of these (all of which do support the new encryption) can open it OK. My help would possibly be in extracting XMLs possible after entering the password, using debugger that then allows to get the decrypted data streams.