Alteryx crashing with Excel input

[Helen_Oliver]

I am a brand new user building my first workflow. I need to import roughly 50 Excel files so that they can be cleaned and combined, with the goal being to leverage Alteryx to do the cleaning more efficiently than the current manual Excel process. These 50 files are all similar but not identical (hence the need for cleaning), and they come from roughly 15 different sources, with each source providing 1-8 files. Files from 14 of the sources are importing perfectly. Files from the 15th source are crashing Alteryx when I run the Input Data tool. I choose the file path and the tab, hit "ok", and then the program stalls and shuts down within seconds. There is nothing outwardly special about the files from this source - they are all small (<20kb), standard .xlsx, single tab, etc. Any insight as to why this might be happening? The only workaround I've found is to open the files in Excel and paste the values into a fresh workbook, then run the input tool on the new workbook, but this reduces the efficiency of an already inefficient data import process! Thanks.

[mceleavey]

Hi @Helen_Oliver ,

When you say "crashing" what do you mean? Can you provide a screenshot of the error?

Thanks,

M.

[Helen_Oliver]

Hi,

By "crash" I mean that the program shuts down - no error message thrown. I can't screen print mid-crash, but here are two photos of my screen. Sorry they appear to be upside down! The first shows after I've chosen the file path in the input tool, then I choose the tab (there's only 1) and click "ok". The second shows what happens after ok - instead of pulling in the data, some weird "Microsoft Excel (.xlsx)" picture fragments show up in the Options box. Then after a few seconds of hanging here, the program shuts down.

 

 

[mceleavey]

@Helen_Oliver ,

Ok, this doesn't sound like an Alteryx problem. 

How much RAM do you have in your PC?

Also, what version are you running?

M.

[Helen_Oliver]

PC is brand new, 16 GB RAM. Alteryx is version is 2020.3. It's so weird because from outward appearances, the files that crash the program are no different from the files that work fine, but clearly for some reason they are not playing nicely with Alteryx.

[ZDraper1]

I am having the same issue

[gabrielvilella]

The software that is generating those files is throwing something in there that does not play nice with Alteryx. Please try updating Alteryx to the latest version. You can contact Alteryx support as well support@alteryx.com.