Nov. 25, 2025
You clicked “Create app from Excel,” felt clever, and accidentally migrated your chaos at scale. In this episode, we break down why Excel is a calculator with delusions of grandeur and why Dataverse will punish spreadsheet habits with integrity errors. I tear down the five silent failure patterns that quietly destroy Power Apps built from Excel data: no primary keys, mixed data types, text lookups instead of real relationships, multipurpose “do everything” columns, and orphan rows that point to nowhere. You’ll hear why identity is a contract, not a column, how surrogate keys and alternate keys stop upserts from behaving like a blender, and how proper types (text, number, decimal, currency, date, choice, lookup, boolean) turn flaky formulas into reliable logic. We’ll walk through replacing VLOOKUP-style thinking with real relationships, splitting overloaded status fields, eliminating orphans with required lookups and cascade rules, and using Power Query to trim, normalize, dedupe, and …