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Document format

.xls

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet (Legacy)

XLS is the legacy binary format used by Microsoft Excel before 2007. While superseded by XLSX, many existing spreadsheets and enterprise systems still use this format.

MIME type

application/vnd.ms-excel

Developer

Microsoft

Introduced

1987

Advantages

  • Compatible with older Excel versions
  • Widely recognized format
  • Supported by all major spreadsheet apps
  • Large installed base

Limitations

  • Limited to 65,536 rows and 256 columns
  • Larger file sizes than XLSX
  • Binary format — harder to recover
  • Missing modern Excel features

When to use XLS

Legacy spreadsheet compatibility
Older enterprise systems
Historical data archives
Backward-compatible exports

Technical details

XLS uses the BIFF (Binary Interchange File Format) within OLE2 compound documents. Limited to 65,536 rows by 256 columns per sheet.

Convert XLS to other formats

12 conversion options available

XLS to PDFXLS to DOCXXLS to DOCXLS to TXTXLS to XLSXXLS to CSVXLS to PPTXXLS to PPTXLS to ODTXLS to RTFXLS to HTMLXLS to EPUB

Convert to XLS from other formats

12 formats can be converted to XLS

PDF to XLSDOCX to XLSDOC to XLSTXT to XLSXLSX to XLSCSV to XLSPPTX to XLSPPT to XLSODT to XLSRTF to XLSHTML to XLSEPUB to XLS

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Other document formats

.pdfPDF

Portable Document Format

.docxDOCX

Office Open XML Document

.docDOC

Microsoft Word Document (Legacy)

.txtTXT

Plain Text File

.xlsxXLSX

Office Open XML Spreadsheet

.csvCSV

Comma-Separated Values

.pptxPPTX

Office Open XML Presentation

.pptPPT

Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation (Legacy)

.odtODT

Open Document Text

.rtfRTF

Rich Text Format

.htmlHTML

HyperText Markup Language

.epubEPUB

Electronic Publication