title: Pandas.read_excel: Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record
body: <p>I'm trying to use pandas.read_excel to read in .xls files. It succeeds on most of my .xls files, but then for some it errors out with the following error message:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Unsupported format, or corrupt file: Expected BOF record; found '\x00\x05\x16\x07\x00\x02\x00\x00'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've been trying to research why this is happening to some, but not all files. The xlrd version is 1.0.0. I tried to manually read in with xlrd.open_workbook and I get the same result. </p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know what file type, this BOF record is referring to?</p>