I'm having problems reading .xls files written by a Perl script which I have no control over. The files contain some formatting and line breaks within cells. filename = '/home/shared/testfile.xls' book = xlrd.open_workbook(filename) sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0) for rowIndex in xrange(1, sheet.nrows): row = sheet.row(rowIndex) This is throwing the following error: _locate_stream(Workbook): seen 0 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 20 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 172480= 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 172500 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 3 2 172520 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 173840= 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 173860 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 173880 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/shared/xlrdtest.py", line 5, in <module> book = xlrd.open_workbook(filename) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/__init__.py", line 443, in open_workbook ragged_rows=ragged_rows, File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/book.py", line 84, in open_workbook_xls ragged_rows=ragged_rows, File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/book.py", line 616, in biff2_8_load self.mem, self.base, self.stream_len = cd.locate_named_stream(qname) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/compdoc.py", line 393, in locate_named_stream d.tot_size, qname, d.DID+6) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/xlrd/compdoc.py", line 421, in _locate_stream raise CompDocError("%s corruption: seen[%d] == %d" % (qname, s, self.seen[s])) xlrd.compdoc.CompDocError: Workbook corruption: seen[2] == 4 I'm not able to find any info about CompDocError or Workbook corruption, even less the seen[2] == 4 part.