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Updating Excel worksheet - Update Row or Insert Row issue

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Posted on by CabLover

Not sure if this is the right forum, but I discovered a quirky problem affecting Update Row and Insert Row when the Excel workbook contains cells with comments!

If there's a comment on any cell in the workbook (you can find those by running "File -> Inspect Workbook"), trying to update a table in the same workbook results in an error similar to this:

{
 "status": 400,
 "message": "Unable to open excel file. File may be corrupted. Please use Excel to recover the file and try again.\r\nclientRequestId: 21d9897b-613f-49f1-a727-30414e7347ab",
 "source": "excelconnectionprovider-westus.tip0-westus.p.azurewebsites.net"
}

However, Get Row works just fine on the same workbook when cell comments are present.

Once the comment has been removed, Update Row works.

It took a lot of trial and error to find this. Hopefully the community can benefit from my discovery.

Would like to hear from Microsoft if this is a bug, limitation or working as designed.

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Using flows

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v-yamao-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi CabLover,

Thanks for feedback.

I can reproduce this issue on my side.

I am afraid that when there are comments in the Excel table, flow cannot validate it. After you run the flow then go back to check the Excel table, you will find that it has been corrupted.

As far as I know, tables in Excel with formula are not supported currently. So I assume that any special properties in excel table are also not supported, this might be a limitation for Flow.

There is a request asking for formula support in Excel table, please consider to comment the idea at here. Or you could also create a new request at Flow ideas Forum, I will help collect and report it from my side.
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/Formula-support-in-quot-Excel-Get-row-quot-action/idi-p/6021

Best regards,
Mabel Mao

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CabLover 3 on at

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Mabel,

thanks for your response. I'm running into this problem again but it's not because of the comments this time.

What other quirks like these are unique to Flow? If I test the update row with PowerApp against the same Excel file it works just fine. It seems that PowerApp and Flow don't exhibit the same behaviour - I assumed they were using the same API calls but I guess that's not the case.

I finally solved it by remove personal information from the Excel file (again by using File Inspector).

It appears that these quirks vary week to week and who knows which ones could appear in the future. Do we have documentation for these sorts of behavior? It doesn't bode well for the future of Flow if MS isn't able to offer consistent API behaviour.

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