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ArcGIS/Survey123 and Excel Connections - Updating with Edits

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Posted on by Community Power Pla...

I'm currently running a flow that takes data submitted via Survey123 and autopopulates it into rows in an excel table. However, we use Survey123 for scientific data collection and sometimes people need to go back in and edit a survey entry. I have tried to trigger a flow to update the excel row when a change is made to the linked ArcGIS feature layer but it never seems to run properly. Has anyone been able to link the excel file and feature layer so when changes are made to one, the other updates or vice versa?

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trice602 15,402 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Anonymous ,

One option that I think would work here is when your end-users submit their survey, include a key value or ID with the results. That way, if they want to update their previous survey, if they include the key value, your automation can look to see if it exists, if true, update an existing excel table row, else... create a new row. Please mark as a solution if this helps! This works great by the way! Always glad to help! Tom 👍🏽

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Thanks @trice602 !

Each survey submitted automatically gets assigned a unique Object ID and a unique World ID. I tried using both those IDs to match feature layer records with the row in excel to trigger updates but neither seemed to do the trick.

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trice602 15,402 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @Anonymous ,

Sorry to hear that. What I was referring to was providing those values to the submitter and if they need to update their data later, all they need to do is include those previously submitted values in their survey and you can use a conditional step to either Update a row or Create a row. Please mark as a solution if that conditional step works for you! Always glad to help! Tom 👍🏽

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jessmill 2 on at

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Hi! I'm doing this exact same thing currently where I have a survey123 feeding the excel sheet. But if people edit the excel sheet, I can't figure out how to update the feature class. How did you go about solving this!?

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hey @jessmill ,

I haven't been able to have edits made in excel feed back into the feature later. I've had some success going the other way though. If someone makes an edit in survey123 or AGOL, I can sometimes get the excel file to update. Using two separate flows, one flow feeds the excel sheet and then the other searches the feature layer for changes and updates and then updates the corresponding row in excel. I am having issues with this flow though because it randomly fails half the time for no reason I can discern. I have a ticket in with ESRI about it right now. I describe it in this community post: here

I did however discover that excel now has an ArcGIS add-in. You can open the excel doc (even from a sharepoint or one drive) and edit the feature layer directly in the excel file. It even has a map sidebar pop up. Its pretty useful in my opinion. However, if you have a lot of people editing the data, be a bit cautious. You have to hit refresh on the data whenever you open it and it will remove any filters or other formatting you may have.

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