How do I open a .xls file in ArcMap without Office installed?

Question

I am trying to open and copy xls documents in the Catalog window of ArcMap 10.6.1. Everytime I try to expand the table I get this error message:

"Failed to connect to database. General function failure. The external table doesn't have the expected format." (translated from German)

I've tried installing (then updating) "2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components" and "Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable" but that didn't help.

I'm running ArcGIS 10.6.1 on Windows Server 2012 R2 without an Office installation. Interestinlgy, on another machine, running ArcGIS 10.5.1 with the same OS and no Office, it works fine!

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 25 '20 at 08:15

Try this which can help you read and use data from a .xls using arcpy window:

import arcpy
import xlrd
inputExcel = xlrd.open_workbook("C:\Users\username\In_excel.xls")
sheetNames = inputExcel.sheet_names()
excelSheet = inputExcel.sheet_by_name(sheetNames[0])
for x in range (0, excelSheet.nrows):
    for y in range (0 excelSheet.ncols):
        cellValue = excelSheet.cell_value(x, y)
        print (cellValue)

How do I open a .xls file in ArcMap without Office installed?

1 Answers1