Hi,
I’m trying to gauge how much of an issue this is generally. I work with DMT a lot, I can run a file, then try to run exactly the same one again but get an error message saying, “DMT - External table is not in the expected format”. Workaround is to copy and paste the contents into a different xlsx file, very frustrating.
Does anyone else experience this? If so, how regularly?
Thanks
I’ve found this happens if I have it open in DMT, then open it in Excel to make changes and then reload. Excel is locking that sheet, so it gives this error. You can test this a bit by adding a second sheet within Excel. If you start with the file loaded in DMT, then open it in Excel, and then click reload in DMT you’ll see sheet2 instead of sheet1.
Extremely rarely I’ve had issues where my only solution was to save as a CSV.
Virtually every time I get this error or similar, it’s because I have that file open in Excel.
Note that CSVs do not suffer from this issue. Excel doesn’t seem to lock them like it does with XLSX files. Of course you lose all the bonuses of XLSX files, so I rarely go this route.
Hope this helps.
I’ve seen this happen when excel is keeping information outside of the data set. (Like a non data cell is currently highlighted). I’ll generally highlight all the ‘empty’ rows and columns and delete them, move the cursor into the data set and save.
That fixes the issue in almost every instance. In the odd case that it doesn’t I save the file as a csv and load it that way.
P.S. Welcome to the Epicor community!
That reminds me - I think I’ve also seen similar when I have my workbook linked to other workbooks (XLOOKUP usually the culprit). Sometimes I’ll highlight the entire sheet, copy/paste as values, save, close and reload the DMT to break it loose.
The link isn’t constant. I link a lot of files, but it does seem periodically something with the link causes this error. Maybe because I have the linked file open in Excel, I’ll have to keep that in mind.
Often enough to be REALLY annoying, not often enough (yet) for me to find it worth the time to troubleshoot when all I have to do to fix is click VIEW, resave the file as .XLS (Excel 97-2003 format), then load that new file. My DMT load files almost invariably have the formula columns converted to values, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference (either can fail, either can work fine).
All of the answers here are ways around it, but I just did an implementation with tons of dmt and most, but not all of the time just deleting a few columns to the right of the data and from the last row to the end of the spreadsheet and saving will allow it to reload.
Sometimes even just banging reload will work the second time.
