Forum Discussion
Import excel into existing list (with data already in it)
RRMX01 if you go to Edit in grid view on your list you can paste in data from an excel spreadsheet.
Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User
I figured it out!! I was struggling with this and really needed to make it work.
It depends on how you click on the cell. If you have the curser flashing in the cell to enter text then it will just paste whatever you copy from Excel as text. However, if you want to copy several rows or items from Excel, you need to click on the cell in grid mode. To do that, if you have the curser flashing, click on an area outside the list.
Step by step:
1. Click on "Add new item"
2. Select the cell you want the rows to go to, or the cell in column A to enter all columns
3. The cell will select and your curser will flash in the first column
4. Click below that row and under the end of the list
5. Your selection will become still the same cell but without the flashing cursor
6. Paste
7. If you had several rows whether just one column or several it will paste all the rows as new rows into your list.
Tested and verified. Works like a charm. See a few screenshots below.
Text entry: (not what you want)
which leads to the following:
No cursor selection should look like so:
And leads to the following:
Notice the "wrong" pasted option at the top and the correct pasting underneath that.
Browser: Chrome
View used: SharePoint Modern View
OS: MacOS 14
yyarin104 OMG you saved the day, thank you for the detailed walk through, I was losing my mind on this one!
- It's great to see that you can paste multiple rows in without using IE/IE mode, esp. since SharePoint is going to stop accepting input from IE in early 2023. Here's a quirk I ran into with a list that has content management enabled and has two different content types: Initially I was getting an error for required fields from content type A, even when I had set the default new content type to B. As a workaround, I created a view that corresponded to all of the editable columns of content type B, but was getting an error that my view was missing required fields. As a test, I identified the required columns in content type A that did not also exist in B, and I set those to not required, and after a ctrl-F5 force refresh of the new view, I was able to import multiple rows with no issue. My plan is to import all rows of content type B, then switch the default content type back to A, then import all type A rows. I will also need to disable any required columns that only exist in type B for the import of the type A rows. This is a crude workaround to being unable to choose a content type when adding items in grid view. PowerAutomate would probably be the more elegant approach but sometimes quick and dirty > elegant for one-offs. For PowerAutomate, you could specify the ContentTypeID column, and get the right ID of the lists's sub-version of the site content type ID, found in the URL when in the "Edit All" mode of editing an item of the content type you want the ID for. For example: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/How-to-pass-content-type-Id-from-PowerApps-to-SharePoint-List/td-p/437498.
