cannot import .xlsx files anymore

[Peter Swan]

STATA/IC ver 13.1 for mac
Excel 16.11.1

Previously no issues with .xlsx files, if I try and import a recent revision of a xlsx file I get the following STATA error message:
"Unable to load Excel file, Error: Element not found"

If I load older version of .xlsx files there is no error message and it imports ok, similarly if I convert the .xlsx to .xls then the file imports, but is a larger size (to be expected)

There are some posts on this from the last 5 months, but nothing that identifies or solves the problem.

Please help, many thanks

[Joseph Coveney]

This error message has been noted before on the list. As far as I have read here, the error seems to have to do with a subtle corruption of the Excel workbook.

[Peter Swan]

Thanks for the reply. Any idea how this corruption occurs and more importantly how to avoid it ?

[Martin Tong]

I met the same problem unfortunately. Seeking for a solution.

[Joseph Coveney]

This has been sporadically coming up on the list for the past seven years, over various versions of Microsoft Excel and releases of Stata. It seems to be a rare phenomenon that cannot be reliably reproduced by others from scratch, and never has anyone posted an offending Excel workbook for anyone to examine.

So, I recommend that any user who has encountered this problem to contact Stata technical support, and if it is at all possible to furnish them with the Excel file. I think that StataCorp is the party in the best position to track this thing down. It's not great to shrug, but I doubt that starting new threads (or appending new posts onto old threads) complaining of it will work any better now than it has up until now.