Pandas.read_excel: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record

Question

I\'m trying to use pandas.read_excel to read in .xls files. It succeeds on most of my .xls files, but then for some it errors out with the following error message:

Answer 1

I solved this problem loading it with pd.read_table (it loads everything into one column)

df = pd.read_table('path/to/xls_file/' + 'my_file.xls')

then I split this column with

df = df['column_name'].str.split("your_separator", expand=True)