Reading files from SharePoint and changing format files

[Panri93]

Good morning to everyone,

I've a set of files allocated in SharePoint. Those files are .xls files, which means, Excel 97-2003. Due to a variety of reasons I'd like those to be converted to .xlsx format. My question is, is there any way to read those files using Power BI and convert them to .xlsx before importing them into tables?

Many thanks

[Panri93]

Thank you! Finally we coded a Python script 🙂

[ppm1 · Accepted solution]

Three potential approaches to consider:

1. Use the xls files in Power BI as is (be aware that xls can be a problem - Avoid Using Excel XLS Files As A Data Source — ehansalytics

2. Use Power Automate Desktop to create a UI flow to batch convert them

3. Use R or Python to do it (technically you could do it through the R/Python integration in Power BI Desktop to read in the xls file and write xlsx to local disk, but it wouldn't be part of normal refresh).

Pat