Import of Excel XML Spreadsheet fails with "General Error. General input/output error."

[bjoly]

We are trying to resolve an issue where a spreadsheet exported from Magento (customers.xml) is failing to open in LibreOffice Calc.

I am running the following version of Calc on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

LibreOffice 3.5.3.2
Build ID: 350m1(Build:2)

The customers.xml file is 4.7MB and formatted in UTF-8. Attempting to open the file with Calc fails with the error “General Error. General input/output error.”.

I inspected the file with a text editor. No XML is missing. I then validated the file using http://validator.w3.org/. The XML is valid.

Calc opens other exported Excel XML files without error so I suspect that the failure may be due to an invalid character.

I want to debug this issue but don’t know where to find the LibreOffice error log. Where can I find the log(s) to get a detailed error report?

[mmohrhard]

There are no error logs unless you have a special developer build and even then the logs only contain information that are helpful for developers. Could you maybe open a bug report? On the other side 3.5 is quite old and unsupported upstream. There were some fixes from Peter to fix some problems with recursive xslt patterns during the Excel XML import but I don’t remember when we pushed them.

[Reynaert]

Had the same problem, which was caused by unescaped ampersands; replace all occurrences of ‘&’ by nothing, and the import works fine.

[mariosv]

Please do a test, selecting the filter for this file type. I think there was a bug about it.

[bencomp]

Could you add how you suppose “doing a test” works? How do you select this filter? Is this bug about LibreOffice selecting the incorrect import filter when letting it choose automatically?

[mariosv]

You can select it in the open file window.