Hi, MatthewC

Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.

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As our developers pointed out on this documentation about linking tables to Excel,

Please note: Once you create a table from an Excel file, changes in this file, like:

• Changing the column’s name,
• Changing the column’s order,
• Deleting the column, and
• Adding a new column.

are highly not recommended, because the table in the wpDataTable plugin will not work, at the moment. If you make any of these changes, please recreate the table again.

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Let me know if that makes sense, and if you have any further questions?

Thank you

Hi, MatthewC

Perhaps there was a missunderstanding.

The issue is not with the format of the Excel file, in terms of file extension.

You should be able to use any .XLS and .XLSX formats.

- From my experience, it seems that the "Office Open XML Spreadsheet" ( .xlsx) seems to be the most reliable,

but i didn't experience issues with other .xls  and .xlsx Excel formats as well,

so i can't recommend which would be the best to use.

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I will clarify what i meant in terms of when the existing linked table can break.

The issue can happen if you change the structure of the data in the source file,

such as if you change the header names, or reorder the columns;

if you add a new column, or remove an existing column;

or if you change filename,   the path to the file.

Then if you already had a wpDataTable linked to this file,  the table would break if you make changes like that,

and then you would have to make a new table from this "changed file".

Let me know if that makes sense?

Thank you