Error message: "Problem with some content in ... .xlsx. Do you want us to try to recover"

[korodidaniel]

Hi Team,

while trying to open one of the Excel output files of my Alteryx workflow, I receive the following error message:

"We found a problem with some content in '... .xlsx'. Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes."

I have faced the same error before when some of my workflows tried to use a sheetname that is too long for Excel. Alteryx accepts these too long sheetnames, but Excel has some length limit on sheetnames so it gives you the same error.

In this case all my sheetnames are short. I am creating files from scratch, so there is no special content or controller or connection present in any of these files.

My workflow run generates 23 files with the very same structure, 22 of them are totally fine and only 1 of them produces the above error message. Sheet names are the same, fields are the same, length of file names are the same.

The same error happens regardless if I run the workflow from Designer or from Gallery.

I could find many threads in Alteryx Community where users have the same error message but their issue remained unsolved.

Do you have any idea what else to check?

Thanks,

Daniel

[korodidaniel · Accepted solution]

SOLVED! Issue was caused by a string value starting with = character. Excel automatically tried to interpret is as a formula, of couse it couldn’t.

[knhopper]

I've been running into this issue lately, and finally found a fix that worked for me. I changed the File Format to "Microsoft Excel Legacy (*.xlsx)" as opposed to "Microsoft Excel (*.xlsx)" and that seems to have resolved things. Sharing in case anyone else comes across this post looking for help.