Please explain SharePoint Columns

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Posted on by KickingApps

628

I have a Sharepoint List with 3 columns formatting exactly the same:

Single line of text
- This is used to store empl id's of each speaker

In my PowerApp, when I reference the columns:

SpeakerId
SpeakerId2
SpeakerId3

The intellisense results display as:

'SpeakerId (SpeakerId0)'
'SpeakerId2 (SpeakerId20)'
SpeakerId3

Why the difference. I thought it might have to do with how I added the column in SharePoint -- Create Column (from List Settings) vs. Add using the '+' in the quick edit. But when I tried to reproduce, using both methods, it did not result in the column wrapped in ' '. Baffled and would like to understand ;). Thanks!

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Building Power Apps

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timl 36,387 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @KickingApps

According to the help, Intellisense shows names in brackets when column names are not unique.

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/display-names-enters-preview-for-canvas-apps/

Since display names are not guaranteed to be unique there is the potential for conflict between two columns. If this happens, the logical name of the conflicting column will be shown in parenthesis after the display name. For example, this entity has two columns with Size as the display name, with cr5ca_sizewidth (shown) and cr5ca_sizeheight (not shown) as logical names:

Therefore, is there someway that you could have ended up with two SpeakerId and SpeakerId2 columns?

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KickingApps 628 on at

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@timl Thank you - it makes sense. As a note, if you create a column, delete it and create a new column with the same name as that that was deleted, it seems to no longer be unique. Even if you deleted.
Appreciate your response.

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timl 36,387 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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@KickingApps Thanks for clarifying how deleting and recreating a new column with the same name produces a different 'logical' name. That's really useful to know.

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iAm_ManCat 18,228 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hey,

Just chipping in here - internal names are constant, permanent and never re-used (think of them as absolute object identifiers - no matter where in sharepoint or o365, if it sees a reference to that specific name, it knows exactly where and what it is).

Also SharePoint naming can run you into all sorts of trouble due to it technically have three names when you create an item (Internal, Display, Static).

I put a few details here in an old post regarding field sizes, but the short version is that internal names are single-use.

There's also this really old blog post on Perficent which covers where Static name might be used from a dev point of view and also covers why sharepoint adds a number to the end of identical columns (spoiler: it's so that internal names are not duplicated and so that they can be referenced specifically without confusion)

Cheers,
ManCat

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