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shneierl's avatar
shneierl
Frequent Visitor
4 years ago
Solved

DataFormat.Error: External table is not in the expected format. Details: when i've removed rows and

I am trying to combine files that are in one of our shared folders ( network drive not sharepoint) so i go into get data from folder navigate to the root folder in question and it transform dasta. th...
Need Help
  • shneierl's avatar
    shneierl
    4 years ago

    Thanks for coming back to me. I appreciate that replicating this issue is probably hard trying to recreate sample data based on a folder structure might be hard but I could try and build a simple table for what the sample file should look like and link that if useful. 

     

    However after some brute force debugging (just repeating steps one at a until it worked) and I think I have Iresolved the issue,. basically I think for some reason i was hitting a time out error without it being identified as i hit refresh preview or split the remove top rows into a couple steps and it seemed to eventually work without the error coming through. my other guess is someone in a different team was working on the file i was using as the reference file in my source data even though i don't think that was the case. i'd still love to know what caused the error but as i have been able to pull together a consolidated version of the tab i was testing now i just need to replicate it for all the tabs in this workbook

v-jingzhang's avatar
v-jingzhang
Community Support
4 years ago

Hi shneierl 

 

I cannot reproduce this error with the sample data. Can you provide a sample file (removing sensitive data) which can help reproduce this error?

 

Can you test if you don't use Folder connector, connect to the sample file with Excel connector and perform the same operations, will this error happen?

 

I found some solutions for the similar question. Try if they can work. It seems this error is not caused by the table structure but caused by something outside. 

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/External-table-is-not-in-the-expected-format/td-p/153986 

https://www.mrexcel.com/board/threads/power-query-xls-import-error-dataformat-error-external-table-is-not-in-the-expected-format.1189717/ 

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/lync/en-US/df02e679-a65e-4d9c-90e5-05074770dfa7/dataformaterror-external-table-is-not-in-expected-format?forum=powerquery 

 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Jing
If this post helps, please Accept it as Solution to help other members find it.

  • shneierl's avatar
    shneierl
    Frequent Visitor
    4 years ago

    Thanks for coming back to me. I appreciate that replicating this issue is probably hard trying to recreate sample data based on a folder structure might be hard but I could try and build a simple table for what the sample file should look like and link that if useful. 

     

    However after some brute force debugging (just repeating steps one at a until it worked) and I think I have Iresolved the issue,. basically I think for some reason i was hitting a time out error without it being identified as i hit refresh preview or split the remove top rows into a couple steps and it seemed to eventually work without the error coming through. my other guess is someone in a different team was working on the file i was using as the reference file in my source data even though i don't think that was the case. i'd still love to know what caused the error but as i have been able to pull together a consolidated version of the tab i was testing now i just need to replicate it for all the tabs in this workbook