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Excel connections to OneDrive are highly unstable

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Posted on by ameyers_MSFT Microsoft Employee

I'm having an extremely difficult time with connections to an Excel file on my OneDrive. When I try to set up a new flow, I usually get a "Invalid character" error when trying to pick a table for an Insert Row action. When I open one of my existing flows, it takes forever and almost always when it comes up, the Excel action has a "Network request failure" error on it (or sometimes "Failed to fetch: GetTable").

I think this got a lot worse recently as I had some trouble but not nearly this much when I first set up some flows a couple weeks ago.

Here is one of my flows with this problem:

https://flow.microsoft.com/manage/flows/be0c256a-4e53-46ba-96fe-9925f145f361

(Ironically, I got the following when trying to post this message:

There was an error while attempting to post your message. Try again in a few minutes.

Sigh...)

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v-yamao-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi Ameyers,

For “Invalid character” error, in your new flow to get tables or insert row, what properties did you set? To reproduce this issue, please provide a screenshot of your flow.
For “Network request failure”, this error occurred when you opened existing flows, were these flows all having connections to OneDrive? Or when you opened flows with no connection to OneDrive, did this error occur?

Best regards,
Mabel Mao
ameyers_MSFT Microsoft Employee on at

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Here's a screenshot of my flow for the "Invalid character" issue:

Here's the network request failure -- it only happens when opening a flow with OneDrive Excel connection:
ameyers_MSFT Microsoft Employee on at

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Let me know if some info from a Fiddler trace would be helpful.
v-yamao-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi Ameyers,

Thanks for your screenshot. I created a flow “when a new tweet is posted, insert row to Excel in OneDrive”, I could select the Table name. so make sure you had formatted your Excel sheet as a table. This flow ran and rows were inserted to my Excel sheet.

For your second flow, I created a flow with “when a new tweet is posted, get tasks in Wunderlist, with an action, if yes, insert rows to Excel in OneDrive”. I can also select the Table name and the flow worked well. Then when I opened the flow, just as you said, it took a long time and an error ”Network request failed” occurred. However, when I tried to open it again, sometimes it can also be opened quickly and no error occurred.

You could use a Fiddler trace to capture logs for this issue to get some information and check if your Network works well.

Best regards,
Mabel Mao
ameyers_MSFT Microsoft Employee on at

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Let me first reiterate that both of these issues are occur intermittently (although they occur about 80% of the time or more for me). My table is formatted correctly in Excel and occassionally it works -- in fact, the first time I tried this morning it worked but then the next two times (with the same file) it did not work.

I'm using Microsoft Corpnet so network connection should be fine. In any case, Flow shouldn't be so dependent on the network connection -- good retry logic is expected in a web app.

Here is a failing request/response for the first scenario (the Invalid character -- looks like it is "invalid character" because the response is HTML instead of JSON):

Link to request txt
Link to response txt
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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I just want to reaffirm that OneDrive connections are almost useless. Their failture rate is easily 80% or more. It's completely unreliable.