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Excel - Vote to add numeric column support to the 'Excel Online Business Connector' connector!

The Excel Online Business connector does not correctly support number / numeric columns. This post describes this behaviour in more detail, and provides a link where you can vote to fix this limitation.

The Excel Online Business connector does not appear to support numbers / numeric columns.

This limitation causes a number of problems. The first is that it isn't possible to sort the numeric column in the correct numeric sequence. The second is that it won't be possible to filter values by comparison operators, such as the greater than and less than operators.

Recreation of problem

To highlight this problem, I created an Excel spreadsheet with a 'price' column that is formatted as a number. As the screenshot beneath shows, Excel correctly recognises this as a numeric column because it right aligns the cell values.

Next, I converted these values to a table and upload the spreadsheet to OneDrive.

Next, I created a connection to this data source from Power Apps using a Excel Online Business connector.

Power Apps recognises the price column as text rather than a number, despite the column being defined as a number in Excel.

In the screenshot beneath that shows a form that'ss connected to the Excel table, notice how the 'abc' icon appears next to the price field, rather than the '123' icon.

Note - this limitation does not affect OneDrive / Excel connector.

To clarify this behaviour further, this same behaviour exists with the 'OneDrive for Business' connector.

However, this problem does not exist with the standard OneDrive connector. If I save the exact same spreadsheet to a personal OneDrive account and connect using the OneDrive connector, Power Apps correctly recognises the price column as a numeric column.



Conclusion

It's important to be able to access numeric columns correctly through the Excel Online Business connector, primarily because this enables us to access to larger spreadsheets. I have therefore added this post to the Microsoft ideas forum, and you can vote for this feature if you would also like to see this feature added to Power Apps.

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