Excel file format is not valid. Please help as unable to open Excel.
I think I found the solution.
If you disable the office dropbox add-in the problem doesn't seem to occur anymore. You can still save to dropbox via file explorer making it redundant anyhow.
to do this, open excel, go under file, Choose "Options", and navigate to "add-ins".
From there locate the Dropbox Add-in and right click, select "disable".
Should stop it from being an issue.
I am trying to open Excel from both but neither are opening. Desktop error says "file format is not valid". I edited the document on 2 September with no issues.
Hey @flew,
Hmmm... Mere guess here, since I've encountered the same error in the past.
If it's an .xls file, you'll probably need to modify (:repair) the file extension to .xslx. If you run a google-search, you'll easily find some articles that will walk you through the process as well.
If this persists, would you mind including a screenshot (omitting personal info) of what you're seeing in your next post here, so that I check it with you?
Thanks!
After checking throughally it seems when this is done in Excel 2016, it saves as a CSV format but with a .xlsx file extension. Making Excel think it's corrupted when it's just under the wrong file extension. Seems to be an issue exclusively with using the dropbox saving function in office.
Can someone else test this out? I am unsure why this is happening this way. The workaround is simple, save locally instead of with dropbox. But feels like a bug someone should be made aware of.
Try renaming to .csv and doing save as outside of Dropbox. Currently dealing with an identical issue and found it was still in it's original format when used the dropbox saving function in office 2016. Making it seem corrupted when it was just something in the process changes the file extension but not the actual format.
Brandos wrote: it saves as a CSV format but with a .xlsx file extension
it saves as a CSV format but with a .xlsx file extension
I'm seeing the opposite. When I do a Save As, specify Dropbox as the location and select CSV as the file type, it's saving the file in the XLSX format with a .csv file extension. Saving to the Dropbox folder directly, without using the Save to Dropbox functionality, the file is saved correctly.
So it seems it's a problem with the save as function in general in excel not just any particular file format. The function of doing a save as to a different format is not working correctly when saving to dropbox.
Wish we could get some support members to look at this and give us an idea on why this is happening and what fix there is if any.
Merging several posts with the same description.
Do we have any new information on this issue. I don't see any solutions being presented. All I have is workarounds.
Hi there
I am all of a sudden having the same problem, using Excel 2016 pro. I have removed the dropbox add in adn tried saving in different formats. This is a real problem for a company that uses spreadsheet after spreadsheet, any updated fixes welcome. Thanks
Hey @Tombromgrove,
Just to add some additional information to what @Mark said.
The issue you seem to be having is probably be due to a limitation of the applications that you're using to open the files in question.
This means that there are files that your applications can't process correctly since they have file paths that are too long ( the file path from your screenshot is a great example).
This behavior is present if there are more than 255 characters in the entire file path. This means from the C:\ all the way to the extension of a file. Note that the latest Dropbox desktop application versions do support for Dropbox to read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters and files will sync to and from those locations, however the applications used to open said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, etc.) might not support reading from these locations with long file paths and may show error messages like the one you get when trying to open, save or edit these files. This is out of our control since the application developers would have to add support for long paths to resolve the issue.
You should be able to resolve the issues with your applications processing these files by simply renaming the file to a shorter name, renaming a folder to a shorter name, or reducing the number of sub-folders.
I hope this helps!
Hi Guys,
thanks very much for the responses, we will change the docs to shorten the total length as per your recommendations. Thanks again!!
Tom
Please let us know if this helped after all @Tombromgrove!
I have been using my dropbox account for a few years with no issues. Recently, when I was saving a file (which Iregularly use) a message popped up saying I needed to "grant access" to save the file to the location. It was a random message that had never come up before but I granted access and was able to proceed. This has appeared a few times for different files since then.
Now my lastest issue is that it won't let me open a file. The error message states:
"Excel cannot open the file 'George Cycle 2.xlsx' because the file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file."
I use these files regularly and this has just come out of the blue.
All ideas as to why this has started happening would be great!!
There is a huge number of MS Excel issues and errors that stops users to access their work and waste their time and I am among those users. While I was working a message appears that’s says Excel file is not in a recognized format.
Oh no…Excel file is not recognizing the format, how will I work now. Yeah, the wordings matched with yours. But I found the solutions to fix this issue, you want to know how? Look below:
These are just the starters get full information on Excel File Format Is Not Valid.
