Use POI to parse Excel but got exception “Invalid Header Signature”

Question

I was trying to use Apache POI (Version 3.6) to parse Excel .xls file, but got only Exception:

java.io.IOException: Invalid header signature; read 0x07B1FD12         


        

Answer 1

If you get that exception, then your file really isn't a true .xls file. It will instead either be some other file, renamed to have a .xls extension, or a corrupted file.

I'd suggest you try opening the file in Excel, and do a Save-As. That may give you a hint as to the file type. If not, do a save-as as Excel .xls, and then you'll be able to open that file

I don't know what you file is (I don't recognise the header), but I can assure you that it isn't an OLE2 header as a valid .xls file would have.

It's possible that Apache Tika may be able to work out what kind of binary file it is, so you could always try with the Tika-App jar

Answer 2

Just an idea, if you using maven make sure in the resource tag filtering is set to false. Otherwise maven tends to corrupt xls files in the copying phase in in your pom.xml