XLS Timed out error

[reyvr]

Hello,

I get this error when trying to connect to XLS file on our network drive:

It is a read only file. 

If I open and convert the file to xlsx, I no longer get this problem.  Its a little cumbersome to do this as we have about 10 files that come in monthly via xls. Can anyone advise how I can work around this?

Thanks

[AbhilashR]

Hi @reyvr, can you copy-paste the .xls file on your local machine and see if you still get the same error? 

[reyvr]

Nope, get the same error when moved to the local drive.

The file does take awhile to open in xls format in excel. In xlsx its much faster.

[patrick_digan]

@reyvr At the risk of possibly muddying the waters here, I'll just say that I've been having this same issue with 2020.4 but 2020.2 isn't having this issue. I have both installed on my machine currently. It's only some files, and like you say, saving them as a fresh xlsx does seem to resolve the issue. And I agree that it's really annoying.  

[reyvr]

Thanks all.

An update, I tried breaking links in the excel file and saving a "copy of" to remove the read only property. It still lags out. Only solution it seems to save as xlsx. I guess need to do a script outside of Alteryx to preprocess all the xls files in the directory. Unless there is something else I'm missing?

[AbhilashR]

@reyvr, I haven't experienced this error before so don't have a direct solution for you. You could explore Alteryx's Virtual Solution center support if you are up for it, maybe they have some insight: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Virtual-Solution-Center/tkb-p/vsc

[patrick_digan]

@reyvr it's a long shot, but here's one possible "fix". 1 file that I know wasn't working last week now works, and 1 thing I've changed that could have fixed it was this. If you click the windows icon and then type environment variables, click on "edit environment variables for your account". Then look at the Temp and Tmp, and add a slash at the end (assuming they don't currently have one):

There was an unrelated alteryx issue that popped up the other day, and this fix addressed it. I could be crazy, but I think this fixed the xls issue for me as well. You'll want to restart alteryx making this change, and maybe your machine if it doesn't work at first. Fingers crossed!

[AbhilashR]

Brilliant solution post if this works - very curious now.

[reyvr]

Added the "\" to temp and tmp. Unfortunately it didn't work. Still get the timeout error.

Thanks for the suggestion!