Querying Excel data in SharePoint – Best Approach?

Forum|Forum|13 days ago
July 28, 2026
4 replies
63 views

Hi everyone,

We need our Moveworks AI Assistant to query tabular data stored in Excel files within SharePoint Online.

Since native SharePoint Indexed Search skips Excel cell data, what is the best way to handle this?

Has anyone successfully implemented either approach, or found a better workaround? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks,
Tanishq Choudhary

Best answer by rgeroulo

Hi @Tanishq Choudhary!

Excel data is skipped during Knowledge Ingestion due to it being unstructured and difficult to parse. What type of questions would you be hoping to support if being able to interact with Excel data and what structure do the files follow? It is usually not recommend to bring this content into Moveworks due to its lack of structure, but I am curious what type of experience you are expecting.

Best,

Ryan

rgerouloAnswer

Community Manager

Hi @Tanishq Choudhary!

Excel data is skipped during Knowledge Ingestion due to it being unstructured and difficult to parse. What type of questions would you be hoping to support if being able to interact with Excel data and what structure do the files follow? It is usually not recommend to bring this content into Moveworks due to its lack of structure, but I am curious what type of experience you are expecting.

Best,

Ryan

Tanishq ChoudharyAuthor

New Participant

Hi @rgeroulo ,

For starters I was just thinking of an excel file that holds the holiday list per country and region.

rgeroulo

Community Manager

@Tanishq Choudhary I see. This type of content would be best served from a knowledge article, docx, or PDF. Moveworks uses the raw HTML of a document to understand headers, titles, paragraphs, bullets, etc. within its indexing and ranking. Excel does not fit this HTML structure, hence why it is not a recommended file type.

Best,

Ryan

Tanishq ChoudharyAuthor

New Participant

@rgeroulo
Thank You.

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