Why does excel report corrupted data on opening when linked to a google sheet

Question

I am connecting an Excel workbook to a Google sheets document. I am pulling in data from both tabs in the Google Sheet to 2 tabs in Excel. The sheets shares the data to the web in excel format. The excel receives that data using power query. All the data looks fine. I save the Excel file. On reopening the file, I receive and error message "We found a problem with some content in .... Do you want us to recover....." When testing this - the amount of data involved is small - just a couple of rows.

Cannot discover why this happens or how to correct it...

Answer 1

When connecting an Excel workbook to a Google Sheets document and pulling in data from both tabs in the Google Sheet to 2 tabs in Excel, you may encounter an error message "We found a problem with some content in .... Do you want us to recover....." when reopening the file. This error message usually indicates that there is a problem with the format of the file. One possible solution is to try saving the Google Sheets document as an Excel file format before connecting it to Excel. Another solution is to use the Text/CSV connector instead of the Excel connector when importing CSV files.

It's also worth noting that when retrieving very large files from SharePoint, you may experience performance degradation. If you have significant business logic in an Excel file being retrieved from SharePoint, this business logic may have to execute when you refresh your data, which could cause complicated calculations. Consider aggregating and pre-calculating data, or moving more of the business logic out of the Excel layer and into the Power Query layer.

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References:

• Excel: Troubleshooting
• Error: We couldn't find any data in your Excel workbook
• Mail merge error when a data source is accessed by multiple users in Word