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shanebo3239
Helper I
Helper I

Data from On-Demand Hosted XLS File

I have an issue that I've been beating my head against the wall for weeks with.  I have a vendor that has a web-hosted report that I need the data from.  The report itself isn't useful, but they have an "Export to Excel" feature for it.  The XLS file generated when I click that link always has the same name, but the data updates constantly.  So, if you close Excel and open it back up a few minutes later, you'll see new data.  Please note this report system is not on my personal network, but the vendor's, so using UNC paths or anything of that sort is out.

 

The issue I'm having is getting this data into Power BI automatically.  I have a URI to this spreadsheet (though, again it doesnt "exist" until something requests it).  When I try to use "Web" as my data source in PBI Desktop, I get "DataFormat.Error: External table is not in the expected format."  I've tried OData and a number of other methods to pull the data from the spreadsheet, but nada.

 

Can anyone help?

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Anonymous
Not applicable

That might be your problem then.  XLS isn't very well supported.  Can you get your vendor to export in either XLSX or CSV?

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4 REPLIES 4
Anonymous
Not applicable

Is this an XLS file or an XLSX file?

Just an xls
Anonymous
Not applicable

That might be your problem then.  XLS isn't very well supported.  Can you get your vendor to export in either XLSX or CSV?

I actually did find a way to modify the URL to get the application to spit out a CSV instead of XLS.  That is working much better.  Thank you so much!

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