Form that writes to Excel slowly breaks for a few users at a time, "unknown error"

[YRegister]

Hi, I have a PowerApps form that I've been wrestling with for some time now.   It has worked in some form for months, but recently I can't keep it working and the strange part is that it stops working for other people before it stops working for me.  Since it works for me, the options for troubleshooting are limited (when it didn't work for me, Monitor was unhelpful: "unknown error").  The Excel file is stored on a SharePoint page.

It's a simple form that

• 1)  reads from a few Excel lists and tables to populate some drop-down menus and data table screens, respectively
• 2)  writes to an Excel table
• 3)  sends an email with the data when it successfully writes to the table.

There is no Patch command that I've added to the PowerApp, but the message implies an issue with a Patch function.   When it stopped working a week or two ago, I rebuilt the app to the exact detail of the original version and it worked fine again for a week or so, and now some users are getting the error again (still works for me, but I anticipate it will eventually stop like it did last time).  There are no changes to the system at the time that the app stops performing, it just decides to stop working for one or two users at a time. 

Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can fix this?   I hear that PowerApps and Excel don't play as nice as they should, but I need this data in a spreadsheet for analysis, and I'm not sure of any workarounds that would get us what we need.

Thanks,

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @YRegister ,

You probably don't want this answer, but you are correct that Excel is a terrible data source for Power Apps which only exacerbates as the record numbers grow. Also concurrent sessions do not help. If you want the data for analysis, why not put it all in a SharePoint List, set up an Export view and export to Excel, pasting the data into a tab in your analysis Excel template (which is what I do).

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[YRegister]

Thanks, yes, that is what I'm coming to understand.   Since there isn't much of my team who would be familiar with SharePoint, I'm electing to not go that route, but it is a reasonable approach overall.  I'd like them to be capable of editing the dataset if needed and I don't want them to have to learn a new platform. 

I've elected to switch the dataset over to xlsm and build a form in Excel that will do what I need with VBA.  The last hurdle is understanding why the email reports that will get sent out with new entries aren't including the body...

Thanks!  

By the way, I'm using other PowerApps that I've built to feed information to Excel files and I'm not having any issues with those yet (and they are bigger datasets).   The only difference I can detect is that the ones that seem more stable don't read AND write with the Excel file, only write.   I really hope they stay stable because I can't do what I want with any of the other Forms options.