The file was refused
A refused file never reached the part of Connect that reads documents. One file service handles every attachment, and it checks the format, the content and two specific safety conditions before parsing begins. The reason is shown with the refusal, and it is nearly always one of four: an unsupported format, content that is not what the extension claims, or one of the two safety refusals.
What you see#
The file does not appear in the conversation or on the sheet. Instead you get a short refusal naming the reason, and the attachment control returns to its empty state. Nothing is half-attached: there is no partial upload sitting somewhere waiting to be cleaned up, and re-opening the screen does not bring the file back.
A refusal is not a failure. The distinction matters because the two want different responses from you. A failure means something broke and trying again is reasonable; a refusal means the file was understood and declined, and trying the same file again will produce the same answer.
The causes, in the order they are worth checking#
| Cause | How to recognise it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The format is not read | The extension is not PNG, JPEG, WebP, PDF, DOCX, XLSX, CSV, TSV, PPTX, TXT, MD or JSON | Export or save a copy in one of those formats |
| Content does not match the extension | A file renamed rather than converted — .xlsx on something that is not a spreadsheet | Open it and save it properly from the application that owns it |
| A DOCTYPE or ENTITY declaration | Usually an XML-based or exported document carrying an external-entity declaration | Re-export without it, or paste the content as text |
| An archive that expands unreasonably | A small file that decompresses to something enormous | Send the actual document rather than an archive of it |
| The file is empty or truncated | A zero-length file, or a transfer that stopped early | Check the size at source and send it again |
| The document is password-protected | A file that opens only with a prompt | Remove the protection on a copy, then attach the copy |
What Connect completed#
- The check itself, at the file service both audiences share, so a customer workspace and the operator workspace behave identically.
- The refusal, with a reason you can act on rather than a generic failure.
- Nothing else. No record was created, no version was written and no conversation now references a file that does not exist.
That last point is the useful one when you are unsure whether to retry. There is no cleanup to do after a refusal, so a second attempt with a corrected file starts from the same place the first one did.
What Connect did not complete#
The file was not stored, not parsed, not read by a model and not attached to any record. If you asked a question in the same message, that question was answered — or not answered — without the attachment, which is worth re-reading: an answer given about a file that never arrived is an answer about nothing, and it will not say so unless you notice the refusal.
No usage was consumed either. A refused file costs nothing against storage or against any model budget, because no model was involved.
What you can do, and what an administrator can do#
Read the reason before changing anything.
Result Four of the six causes above are fixed differently, and guessing usually means converting a file that did not need converting.
Convert rather than rename.
Result Renaming changes nothing that is checked; the content is what decides.
If the source is a system you do not control, ask for a plain export — CSV for tables, PDF for documents.
Result Exports from reporting tools are the most common origin of both a wrong extension and a stray declaration.
If the file is genuinely fine and still refused, capture the format, the approximate size and the exact wording of the refusal.
Result Those three facts are what an administrator needs; the file itself is often not shareable.
There is no per-workspace setting to widen the format list or relax the safety refusals, so an administrator cannot let a particular file through as an exception. What an administrator can do is check whether the same refusal is happening across the workspace — a pattern points at one source system rather than one file.
Escalate when the same file is accepted by other tools, the reason given does not match anything in the table above, and it happens with more than one file from the same source. A single odd file is a file; a repeated pattern is worth reporting.
Questions#
Is there a file size limit?
No single published figure appears in the sources this page is written from, so none is quoted here. What is documented is the archive-expansion refusal, which is about the ratio between a file's size and what it expands to rather than the size itself. A large but honest document behaves differently from a small dishonest one.
Why was my file refused when the same file works elsewhere?
Most other tools open a file optimistically and deal with problems as they arise. The check here runs before parsing, on the content rather than the name, and it treats an external-entity declaration as disqualifying rather than as something to ignore. A file can be perfectly usable in a word processor and still be a bad thing to hand to an automated parser.
Can I paste the content instead?
Yes, and for a short table or a page of text it is often the faster route. Pasted text is treated as text you wrote, so it carries no provenance back to a source file — fine for a one-off question, less good when the answer will need to be traced to a document later.