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

[Albihany]

Dear Microsoft,

This is really frustrating and to be honost this is not the first time it happens to me i have a very critical and important work that i need to finish and i can't understand why this issue is happening to me, it seems that the compatibility of the data types between excel and PBI is not coreectly done.

My issue is that i keep getting this message:

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

Whenever i try to get the data from my excel datasheet with one column of type short date, i have tried deferent date formats and i'm still getting the same error message, i remember this was never an issue before and i could've use the same file as data source without a problem before this new year update.

Please let me know how i can solve this issue, as i'm running in very tight deadline and i have to finish a donor report.

PS: I looked at this issue and it doesn't solve anything : Click Here

[Albihany]

Hello everyone,

I think i found out the cause of this issue, so i thought it might help others who face the same problem.

It seems that the issue with getting the data from an excel sheets sometime is due to the way power bi desktop handle the file data, as it appears to me that the software uses the first column in the excel sheet as a key column, accordingly if your first column contains let's say text data such as the list of customer names or dates of purchase. it won't load showing the error message above: " The input couldn't be recognized as a valid Excel document", (Which is unfortunately doesn't describe the actual cause of the error), and this is totally understandable as those type of data can always be duplicated, and that's break the rule of PK.

Having said that, i think for the time being the best way to go around this issue is to change the order of the column by using any non-duplicated column as the first column, or perhaps, using an index column with serious of numbers for each row.

Finally, i think the best way for Microsoft and power bi team to totally solve this issue is to assign the id number for each row automatically behind the scene to each row at the time of loading the file which will avoid coming across this error message ultimately for once and for good.

Albihany

[Anonymous]

@Albihany , Older post but your solution helped me. I made new first columns and put in heading "Index" and numbered it down the rows, increments of one and that fixed the problem for me. Thank you. 

[AbhijeetB]

not able to find "combine and edit" button in power query editor, and not able to combine multiple files. showing error as 

DataFormat.Error: The input couldn't be recognized as a valid Excel document.
Details:
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