Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Issue with Excel - "Excel file format is not valid"
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.
Rich
Super User II
Super User II
Brandos wrote:
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.
Found same issue today this helped Thanks.
Definately an issue with the save to dropbox add-in. Saving a csv to xlsx , using windows explorer to browse to the dropbox folder path has no issues.
Definately an issue with the save to dropbox add-in. Saving a csv to xlsx , using windows explorer to browse to the dropbox folder path has no issues.
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
- MarkI can almost certainly say the issue is not Dropbox, but, the fact that the file structure is too big.
Windows can usually only access files or folders when the total number of characters is less than 250. So, without counting I think thats the issue. You need to make the folder structure smaller (e.g. 'Bromgrove Iraq Ltd' to maybe just Bromgrove and next way to 'Out of Country' etc.) - Walter
Dropbox Community Moderator
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
About View, download, and export
Need support with viewing, downloading, and exporting files and folders from your Dropbox account? Find help from the Dropbox Community.
