Error Read Excel Format

Dear all,

I’m using KNIME to perform some use cases to see if KNIME is the right tool for us.

While running a simple 2 loops workflow to retrieve data from several excel files (that all has the same format), after some iterations, the following error is logged:

ERROR Read Excel Sheet Names (XLS) 4:7 Execute failed: The supplied spreadsheet seems to be Excel 5.0/7.0 (BIFF5) format. POI only supports BIFF8 format (from Excel versions 97/2000/XP/2003)

I’ve looked a bit without being able to get an answer about this error.

Can someone help me ?

FYI: the format of the files is .xls

BR

Hello @CrommVardek -

Due to the version of Apache POI currently used in KNIME AP, there are some issues related to reading and writing older format Excel files. We are actively working on a fix, but I don’t have an ETA for that.

In the meantime, as a workaround, you might open the problem file in Excel and save it in XLSX format. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Hi Scott,

Has this issue been resolved ?

Thanks

Hello @CrommVardek -

We have updated the underlying Apache POI in our nightly build, which I believe should fix the problem. However, it hasn’t made its way into the latest KNIME release quite yet.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can test out our nightly builds here: https://www.knime.com/form/nightly-build

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I see it’s been a while since any comments have been made here however I am experiencing this exact issue and have not found a fix yet. I’ve tried the nightly builds and that has not worked. I am still unable to open old Excel files. I still get this error:

Execute failed: The supplied spreadsheet seems to be Excel 5.0/7.0 (BIFF5) format. POI only supports BIFF8 format (from Excel versions 97/2000/XP/2003)

I am attempting to use the XLS reader. Is there another tool I can use instead? Or is there a fix for this in the works still?

Sorry for the trouble. As a workaround, you might try the Tika Parser node. It’s Apache based too, though, so you might end up with the same error.

Another option, as mentioned before, might be to open the old file in a newer version of Excel, and save that file in the newer format.

I can check with the developers again here, but we may be limited by the available capabilities of the POI library.

You can try to use R packages like ‘gdata’ or ‘readxl’ that can read old Excel formats:

3 Likes

Thanks!! This is actually exactly what I ended up having to do. It was a bit convoluted and I needed to install perl on my machine and get that to work correctly but it works now.

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Hi @rsukup!

I am struggling with the same problem. How did you manage to install perl? I have tried to install it with this code: installXLSXsupport(perl = “perl”, verbose = FALSE), but it does not work.

Thank you very much!

Carolina.