Dataflow Gen 2 - ingest columns with Special characters to lakehouse

[pallavi_r]

Hi All,

I have a very basic question. I am importing data from sharepoint excel to lakehouse. These columns have special characters. How to ingest these data with special characters to lakehouse tables using dataflow gen 2. If this is limitation,  then what should we do to ingest data with special characters (whitespace, -, /)

Kindly help. 

Thanks,

Pallavi

[pallavi_r]

I had asked wrong question, my error was - DataFormat.Error: Invalid cell value '#N/A'. I thought it was some data formatting error due to special character. I resolved this invalid cell value error by fixing the references and in power query I removed duplicates and removed errors.

It allows all special characters in data, mapped text type in the lakehouse.

Thanks,

Pallavi

[v-kpoloju-msft]

Hi @pallavi_r,

Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Fabric Community Forum. Also thanks to @BhavinVyas3003, to his inputs on this thread. Here I provided some official Microsoft links those might be helpful to resolve your thread more quickly. 

When using Dataflow Gen2 to ingest data from Excel (SharePoint) into Lakehouse, columns with special characters (like spaces, /, or -) can cause issues because Lakehouse tables follow Delta standards that restrict such characters in column names.

Here's what you can do: In the Power Query step of your Dataflow Gen2, we recommend renaming those columns before loading. For example, change "Invoice Date" to "Invoice_Date" or "Customer/ID" to "Customer_ID" using the RenameColumns function or UI. This ensures smooth ingestion and avoids auto-renaming surprises.

Also please refer to the below mentioned documentation links for better understanding:
Limitations of Fabric Data Warehouse - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Dataflow Gen2 data destinations and managed settings - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Hope this helps clarify things and let me know what you find after giving these steps a try happy to help you investigate this further.

Thank you for using the Microsoft Community Forum.

[v-kpoloju-msft]

Hi @pallavi_r,

Just checking in to see if the issue has been resolved on your end. If the earlier suggestions helped, that’s great to hear! And if you’re still facing challenges, feel free to share more details happy to assist further.

Thank you.

[BhavinVyas3003 · Accepted solution]

Dataflow Gen2 allows ingesting data values with special characters (like /, -, spaces) into Lakehouse without issues. No transformation is needed for values. As long as encoding is correct (e.g. UTF‑8), values with /, -, whitespace or other special characters can be successfully ingested into your Lakehouse by Dataflow Gen2.
However, if column names have special characters, you must rename them (e.g., use _) before loading to Lakehouse, due to Delta table naming rules.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/dataflow-gen2-data-destinations-and-managed-se...