Getting a reordered column error although columns were not reordered

[danextian]

Hello. I'm fairly new to Power BI. Started using it in late July when it was first introduced to me through a  Data Analyst summit. I've been building reports using it and transferring some of my not so friendly Excel Dashboards to this platform.

I work in a company wherein several employees each maintain an Excel tracker with standard column headers all saved in a folder in a shared drive. Yesterday, I was thrilled to find out that I could actually import  Excel spreadsheet from this folder to Power BI so that cuts the time of running a macro to combine all these workbooks into one and also the hassle of having to maintain a separate table for each and setting up relationships amongsts those tables. It initially worked fine. I was able to load the data into one table. But when I refreshed the report, Power BI would give a "Reordered Columns" error. I viewed the errors and which particulars trackers caused them. I checked these trackers and none of the columns were actually reordered, renamed or removed.  Any help would be highly appreciated. These files are all xlsm.

Additional questions:

If an Excel column is hidden, will PBI consider it as deleted?

If a column is moved to different location but not renamed and within the same tab, will PBI still be able locate it? How about the data type change (date to text), will I have to re-apply the change?

[v-micsh-msft]

Hi danextian,

Would you please share some tetails about the steps that you have done to import Excel files into One table, if possible, would it be convenient for you to share the M code under Advanced Editor here?

In addition, check to see the following blog and see if it would help:

Load Multiple Excel (xls or xlsx) Files

To answer those additional questions, For single Excel file, the data in hidden columns could be seen under Power BI, and would be imported if not removing under Query Editor;

Also for single Excel file, the edited column would be edited the same after a refresh under Power BI, same for location and the data type. And it is hard to tell in the combined Excel files, as the header is only token from the first Excel queried in the folder.

If you need any further assistance on this, please post back.

Regards