I tried to open the file with Kate, trust me, it's an Excel file. I'm using xlrd, it works beautifully (although come to think of it, I haven't tried writing to an .xls file yet... hmmm)
> To clear up the doubts, I'd suggest that the OP do something like this > at the Python interactive prompt: > > print repr(open('nasty_file.xls', 'rb').read(512)) > > If that produces recognisable stuff, then it's a CSV file (or a tab > separated file) masquerading as an XLS file. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list