Supported file formats
The file types Operelio accepts, the size and row limits on each plan, what happens when a file goes over, and what to do if your format is not listed.
By Operelio team · Updated October 22, 2026
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Accepted formats
Operelio accepts these file formats:
| Format | Extensions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (modern) | .xlsx | Excel 2007 and later. Multi-sheet workbooks supported. You pick which sheet to process. |
| Excel (legacy) | .xls | Excel 97 to 2003. You pick which sheet is read, as with .xlsx. |
| CSV | .csv | Comma-separated values. Semicolon, tab and pipe separators are detected for you. UTF-8 encoding recommended. |
| PDF and Word, by email only | .pdf, .docx | Emailed to a watched folder, the file lands there as a CSV of its rows. An upload, a job or the API can't take it. |
File size and row limits
Each plan has its own limits for file size and row count. If your file exceeds the row limit, Operelio processes the first rows up to the cap (the CRM Formatter cleans the whole file first, then keeps the first rows up to the cap), and the job's page notes the total row count, the limit that was applied, and how many rows were processed. A job that runs longer than 10 minutes is stopped and nothing is saved; a smaller file usually gets through.
| Free | Starter | Pro | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max file size | 2 MB | 25 MB | 35 MB | 100 MB |
| Max rows per job | 2,000 | 50,000 | 75,000 | 150,000 |
Formats not supported
Google Sheets, Apple Numbers (.numbers), TSV (tab-separated), JSON, and XML are not supported directly. If your data is in one of these formats, export it to CSV or .xlsx first, then upload that file.
For Google Sheets: open the sheet, go to File > Download > Comma-separated values (.csv). For Apple Numbers: File > Export To > CSV.
One lead at a time is different: a folder's webhook takes each lead as one JSON object, and a trail runs it. A list of leads still goes in as a file.
Character encoding
Operelio reads UTF-8 CSV files (with or without a byte order mark), UTF-16 files (with a byte order mark, or without one when the text is mostly Latin letters) and Windows-1252, which is what Excel on Windows writes for a plain CSV, so accented letters, curly quotes, dashes and the euro sign come through. A file in another older encoding, such as Shift-JIS, GBK or a Cyrillic or Greek Windows code page, is read as Windows-1252 and its letters come out garbled.
To fix this, open your CSV in Excel or Google Sheets and re-save it as "CSV UTF-8". In Excel, the option is "CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited)" in the Save As dialog.
The Data Health Check tool can detect encoding issues in your file. Run it first if you are not sure about your file's encoding.
Multi-sheet Excel files
When you upload a .xlsx or .xls file with multiple sheets, Operelio shows a dropdown to pick which sheet to process. Each job reads one sheet. To use several tabs together, stack them with Merge Files (one job), then run your tool on the result, or run a separate job for each tab.
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