Sample XLS Files — Download Legacy Excel 97-2003 Test Spreadsheets
Microsoft Excel 97–2003 binary · .xls · MIME type application/vnd.ms-excel
Download a sample XLS file — a genuine Excel 97–2003 binary workbook (BIFF8 inside an OLE2 container), generated with xlwt rather than renamed from XLSX. Legacy XLS still arrives from accounting systems, bank exports and older ERP software, and it needs a different parser from XLSX.
Samples hold 100, 1,000 and 10,000 rows of the same fictional orders as our other spreadsheets, with a bold, coloured header row. The 10,000-row file is well under XLS's 65,536-row limit but large enough to time.
Download sample XLS files
| File | Details | Size | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
sample-spreadsheet-100-rows.xls | 100 rows | 22 KB | |
sample-spreadsheet-1000-rows.xls | 1,000 rows | 170 KB | |
sample-spreadsheet-10000-rows.xls | 10,000 rows | 1.6 MB |
Need one of every documents format? Download the documents sample pack (110 KB, one small file of every documents format (14 files)).
Use these files from the command line or CI
Every URL is stable and CORS-open. Pin the SHA-256 in your test and you will know the moment a fixture changes.
# Download one file curl -O https://pnb-website-bucket.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/samples/documents/xls/sample-spreadsheet-100-rows.xls # Verify it (SHA-256 is listed for every file above) shasum -a 256 sample-spreadsheet-100-rows.xls # Machine-readable index of every sample file curl https://pnb-website-bucket.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/samples/index.json | jq '.files[] | select(.format=="xls")'
XLS format at a glance
| Full name | Microsoft Excel 97–2003 binary |
|---|---|
| Extensions | .xls |
| MIME type | application/vnd.ms-excel |
| Era | Excel 97 through Excel 2003 (BIFF8) |
| Container | OLE2 Compound File Binary |
| Limits | 65,536 rows × 256 columns per sheet |
| Magic bytes | D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1 |
What people test with sample XLS files
- Bank and ERP export imports
- XLS → XLSX/CSV conversion
- Parser selection by magic bytes (OLE2 vs ZIP)
Frequently asked questions
Should I still accept XLS uploads?
If your users export from legacy systems, yes — some banks and payroll tools still emit XLS. Parse it with a BIFF-capable library (xlrd, Apache POI, SheetJS) and convert to XLSX on ingest so the rest of your pipeline deals with one format.
Are these XLS files safe to download?
Yes. Every file is generated by our own open script from scratch — nothing is scraped or user-uploaded — and contains no scripts, macros or executables. The SHA-256 of each file is published on this page so you can verify what you received.
Can I use the sample XLS files commercially?
Yes. They are free for any purpose, including commercial products, test suites, demos and redistribution, with no attribution required. There is nothing to license and no one to ask.
Can I hotlink these files or use them in CI?
Yes. Every link is a stable direct URL over HTTPS with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * and long cache headers, so curl, wget, fetch() and test runners can pull them directly. A JSON index of every file is linked from each page (see the command-line section).
Related sample files
Testing a file pipeline? We build them.
Uploads, conversions, previews, document processing and media workflows are the kind of production systems Pine & Birch designs and runs for clients — which is why we needed these files in the first place.
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