"The input couldn't be recognized as a valid Excel document."

this error is specific to excel 2016 whereas i did not observe the same in excel 365.

Any suggestions?

Hi Todd,

Combine Binaries starts working with Excel workbook formats from January this year https://blogs.office.com/2017/02/08/january-2017-updates-for-get-transform-in-excel-2016-and-the-power-query-add-in/, i guess from build 7668.2066. On earlier builds it worked only with CSV (or txt) formats.

I have no old builds available and can't check how Combine Binaries worked before. Now it in most cases correctly recognizes file format and use Excel.Workbook or Csv.Document functions depends on file format. Perhaps on earlier version connector was not so clever and gave an error what can't recognize the format.

That's easy to check if try to open Excel workbook by From File->From CSV, exactly the same connector as within Combine Binaries.

Anyway, that's bit different story. In brief, in your situation PQ analyzes which actual format the file has and, if can, use proper connector independently on which UI menu you use to connect the file (latest builds) or give an error (older builds).

In my case we connect to the file with proper connector which has to work with our file format, but PQ can't parse the file due to internal errors in XML structure of the file (more exactly, non-standard XML configuration from PQ point of view).