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Excel File size 25MB limitation on Excel Online (Business) Connector

Hi Guys,

I am working on a requirement where I need to process excel files with size more than 25MB using Excel Online(Business) connector. I know the limitation that the maximum excel file size supported by this connector is 25MB as for now.

Is there any workaround to achieve my requirement so that I can process excel files more than 25MB?

Hi @Anonymous ,

There's a lot of options here and I will provide three that will work:

1) You can move your large file to Dataflows, eliminate unnecessary columns, and use the data in a Dataverse table. From there, even if the file size remained very large, you can access this pretty easy with SELECT actions. This is probably my first choice because actually, you can just process the data as-is and start using it from Dataverse.

2) If you don't have a premium license and Dataverse is not an option, you can still make this work. One longer route is to chunk out the large workbook into a handful of sheets and process each worksheet separately. 25 MB isn't super large so you can probably get away with a couple of sheets. In your automation flow(s), you'll need to have individual loops to go through each workbook. Granted it is a longer path but also doable. That said, option one is your best option.

3) The last option that can work too is to consider what you are attempting to do with automation. As an example, if you are extracting some data, emailing it, etc, etc and your flow really only needs 12 columns but the dataset has 60 columns, consider making a copy of the file and remove unnecessary columns before bringing it into Power Automate. I know a lot of people don't want to do that, and understand the real issues in many cases, but I do see a lot of data where there's always a ton of data that doesn't actually have any value in a Power Automate flow. If you are only working with a copy of the data, no harm no foul.

Please mark as a solution if this helps! Always glad to help! Tom 👍🏽

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