Problem with xls files

[studious]

I am using V6 Pro to index currently about 5,000 files, amounting to just over 1.5 Gb of data. In general it's going really well but I'm trying to make it absolutely perfect since one of my colleagues is pushing an alternative Indexer which I don't want to use . . .

So I'm concerned that out of my 5,000 files I'm getting 30 failures, most of which are .xls files. The Indexer reports
[XLS plugin error] Failed to convert XLS file due to format or read error. Exit code 8
I can't see anything wrong with these files! They look good, open ok with Excel (I'm using Excel 2003), and don't appear to give read errors.

What's wrong?

24 out of these 30 files are files which I created myself because I had some MS Access files (.mdb) to Index, and I know Zoom doesn't handle .mdb, so I opened them in Access 2003 and exported the single table that each one contained into Excel. The Indexer rejected every one of the 24 - but it rejected other files as well, so I don't think it's just my exporting out of Access that's wrong.

[David]

30 bad out of 5000 isn't too bad. Problems with password protection, encryption, files being named with the wrong extension, and really old Excel file (prior to Excel 95) are pretty common.

Can you try loading one of the bad files into Excel 2003, making a small change of some sort and resaving it to see if that fixes it.

But send us one of the bad ones and we can have a look at it. If the data is confidential, maybe you can make a dummy test file via the Access export feature.

[studious]

Brilliant!

I opened each one of the offending xls files in Excel 2003 and saved it (I didn't even need to make any change). Then I indexed again. All but one now index correctly.

That makes my failure rate only 6 files in 5,018 - I guess NOBODY could find fault with that!

I've been very impressed with Zoom. The indexing of my 5018 files is so swift that it takes longer to ftp the index files to my webserver than it took to create them with the Indexer. And the searches on the website (CGI/Linux) are typically about 0.25 seconds. And the support provided on this forum is second to none. I'm a fan!