First I copied a simple xl file webcontent.xlsx to the cloud. Then from my local kernel I imported the XL file from the cloud. This works fine.

Import[CloudObject["/webcontent.xlsx"], {"XLSX", "Sheets", "Sheet1"}]

My basic idea was to ask the cloudkernel to do the xl import and merge it with a web template into a html page. But it seems the cloudkernel is not able to read xl files. From my local desktop:

CloudEvaluate[Import["webcontent.xlsx","Elements"]]

returns:

{"Data", "FormattedData", "Formulas", "Images", "Sheets"}

This looks hopeful but the next 2 commands return $Failed. The message window shows "cannot import data as xls format".

CloudEvaluate[Import["webcontent.xlsx",{"XLSX","Sheets"}]]

CloudEvaluate[Import["webcontent.xlsx",{"XLSX", "Sheets", "Sheet1"}]]

Maybe it has something to do with the cloudservers running on Linux?

Although when I evaluate the following in a web-interface-notebook in the programming cloud it works fine!

Import["webcontent.xlsx", {"XLSX", "Sheets", "Sheet1"}]

So its not the server but something else. Is the frontend involved? It is my understanding that CloudEvaluate takes its contents to the cloud, then evaluates and returns with the results to the local kernel. Any ideas on where I missed a beat?