Issue with Excel - "Excel file format is not valid"

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 

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

Please let us know if this helped after all Tombromgrove! 

I have been using my dropbox account for a few years with no issues. Recently, when I was saving a file (which Iregularly use) a message popped up saying I needed to "grant access" to save the file to the location. It was a random message that had never come up before but I granted access and was able to proceed. This has appeared a few times for different files since then. 

Now my lastest issue is that it won't let me open a file. The error message states:

"Excel cannot open the file 'George Cycle 2.xlsx' because the file format or file extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file."

I use these files regularly and this has just come out of the blue. 

All ideas as to why this has started happening would be great!!

Thanks!

There is a huge number of MS Excel issues and errors that stops users to access their work and waste their time and I am among those users. While I was working a message appears that’s says Excel file is not in a recognized format.

Oh no…Excel file is not recognizing the format, how will I work now. Yeah, the wordings matched with yours. But I found the solutions to fix this issue, you want to know how? Look below:

1. Utilize the MOC.exe File
2. Open file from within the Excel
3. Try disabling the Add-ins

These are just the starters get full information on Excel File Format Is Not Valid.