You clicked “Create app from Excel,” felt clever, and accidentally scaled your chaos. It’s not your fault—Power Apps makes it look easy. But Excel isn’t a database; it’s a calculator wearing a database costume. The moment you try to operationalize spreadsheet data in Power Apps, Dataverse exposes every hidden flaw: missing keys, mixed types, ambiguous relationships, duplicate entities, orphaned rows, and silent corruption spreading behind the scenes. This episode tears down the five failure patterns that silently destroy Power Apps built on Excel data—and then rebuilds your data model correctly. You’ll learn how to fix primary keys, enforce types, replace VLOOKUPs with proper relationships, eliminate multi-purpose columns, and prevent orphaned records so your app stops breaking under its own weight. If you’re tired of inconsistent behavior, failing imports, broken lookups, and unpredictable automations, this episode is your blueprint. What You Will Learn The Real Reason Excel Data Fails in Power Apps We start by breaking down why Excel feels “fine” for small tasks but collapses in Dataverse:

• No enforced identity
• No enforced types
• No referential integrity
• No audit trail
• No concurrency model
• Unlimited ambiguity
• Hidden inconsistencies from copy-paste culture
  Power Apps expects structure. Excel hides the lack of structure until it’s too late.

You’ll discover why your spreadsheet worked yesterday but fails catastrophically when imported into an actual data platform. Failure Pattern #1 — No Primary Keys: The Silent Destroyer Most Excel “tables” are just rows. No identity. No contractual uniqueness. No stable way to know whether a row is the same record as last week. This episode explains:

• Why surrogate GUIDs must be your primary keys
• Why natural keys drift and break history
• How alternate keys allow clean upserts
• How Excel’s “uniqueish” text values lie to you
• How missing keys cause duplicates, overwrites, and broken automations
• How to generate stable IDs inside Excel before an import
• Why Dataverse’s “Primary Name” column is NOT the primary key

You’ll learn how to build a correct key strategy and fix your source data so Power Apps stops merging the wrong records or duplicating everything. Failure Pattern #2 — Mixed Data Types: The Spreadsheet Horror Show Excel allows one column to contain:
✔ numbers
✔ text
✔ dates
✔ leftover Outlook pastes
✔ blanks that aren’t real blanks
✔ currency symbols mixed into strings Dataverse does not. It enforces meaning. You’ll learn how to model your data correctly with:

• Whole Number vs Decimal vs Currency
• Boolean vs ambiguous text
• DateOnly vs DateTime
• Text fields with normalization
• Choice fields for finite states
• Lookup fields for references

We cover how Power Query can clean, normalize, and coerce types before they ever reach Dataverse, and why ignoring types causes broken formulas, inconsistent logic, and unreliable reports. Failure Pattern #3 — VLOOKUP as “Joins”: The Spreadsheet Illusion Excel users simulate relationships by repeating text values and using VLOOKUP.
Dataverse does not: it uses actual relationships. We show why:

• VLOOKUP duplicates text and drifts easily
• One rename breaks hundreds of dependent rows
• Lookups bind child records to parent IDs instead of labels
• A single change to a parent updates everywhere automatically
• You should model Suppliers, Locations, Categories as tables—not text

You’ll learn how to replace VLOOKUP with Dataverse lookup columns that prevent duplication, preserve history, and eliminate fragile dependencies. Failure Pattern #4 — Multi-Purpose Columns: Where Spreadsheets Go to Die Excel encourages stuffing anything into one column:Back to Episodes