The input couldn't be recognized as a valid Excel document

[Syndicate_Admin]

Hello everyone.  Long time lurker, first time poster.  

I'm working with another department on getting some of their data into PowerBI from excel spreadsheets.  When I load the file to PowerBI I get a simple yet very frustrating error message of...

The input couldn't be recognized as a valid Excel document

Now this is a very complex spreadsheet with multiple tabs and lots of data.  Any commonly known issues that would prompt this error?

[Syndicate_Admin · Accepted solution]

One of the reason could be that the data that you are importing to PBI is  not in excel table. Select the rows and columns from the sheet that you want to import >> Insert Table in excel and try importing it should be able to read the data then .

[Syndicate_Admin · Accepted solution]

Please use the Issues Forum for reporting bugs or issues like this one. Link: http://aka.ms/issues.powerbi.com

This Community Forum is aimed at allowing users to interact/share solutions or questions for how to achieve something with Power BI, rather than reporting specific bugs (we have a whole separate forum for that :))

When reporting the issue, it would be good to clarify whether you're using PowerBI.com directly or are using Power BI Desktop to import your Excel Workbook. If you're using Power BI Desktop, any spreadsheet data is supported (does not need to be a table), so if you're running into this issue there, chances are that the Excel document has some invalid parts that make it unrecognizable.

Thanks,
M.

[Syndicate_Admin · Accepted solution]

Actually I don't think it is a bug.  The user that supplied the excel spreadsheet had hidden the tabs that had the actual data.  So technically PowerBI was correct.  Might want to wait to hear back from the user before closing out and not getting all the information.

[Syndicate_Admin]

Hy,

I had this problem myself.

After deleting sheet by sheet, I found out that the Power BI/ Q can load the excel.

After deleting row by row in the problem sheets, I found out that the Power BI/ Q gave this error,

when there were Active hyperlinks in cells.

After removing hyperlinks the xlsx just loaded.

So if you store www.google.com in a cell it's working.

But when the www.google.com is an active hyperlink (clickable, blue underlined text, which goes to specified address) it says:

Unable to connect
We encountered an error while trying to connect.
Details: "The input couldn't be recognized as a valid Excel document."

[Syndicate_Admin]

Hy,
I had this problem myself.
After deleting sheet by sheet, I found out that the Power BI/ Q can load the excel.
After deleting row by row in the problem sheets, I found out that the Power BI/ Q gave this error,
when there were Active hyperlinks in cells.
After removing hyperlinks the xlsx just loaded.
So if you store www.google.com in a cell it's working.
But when the www.google.com is an active hyperlink (clickable, blue underlined text, which goes to specified address) it says:
Unable to connect
We encountered an error while trying to connect.
Details: "The input couldn't be recognized as a valid Excel document."

[Syndicate_Admin]

I put all my data in tables. It still does not work.

[Syndicate_Admin]

Spot on, just ran into this today, that was the cause for my error.  Appreciate the response.

[Syndicate_Admin]

@tkr_office Thanks for sharing this. This was the cause of the issue for me as well. At least the fix was easy!

[Syndicate_Admin]

Just had the same problem, but our data was already in the table format.

Oddly enough, changing it back to a standard data range ended up fixing it for us.

An alternate solution for anyone else getting stuck with this.