If your workspace has Genie spaces enabled, you can upload Excel (.xlsx) directly to Genie and analyze it there; itโs designed for quick validation and NLQ over uploaded files and UC tables.
Otherwise, you can use the following approaches:
Option A: Use the โCreate or modify a tableโ UI with a clean CSV
- Open the Add or upload data flow and choose Create or modify a table. Select your CSV file, then pick an active compute to preview (SQL warehouse or serverless). Group clusters are not supported for this preview step.
- In the format options for CSV, set these correctly:
- Turn on/off First row contains the header to match your file. Header settings must be consistent across files you upload together.
- Set Column delimiter to the actual separator (comma is default; only one character is allowed and backslash is not supported).
- If schema inference caused casting problems, disable Automatically detect column types so all columns are treated as STRING; you can transform after table creation.
- If any field contains embedded newlines, enable Rows span multiple lines before previewing.
- Check and fix column names:
- Column names must not include commas, backslashes, or Unicode characters; avoid special characters (spaces are commonly problematicโrename to underscores before creating or rename later in a notebook/workflow).
- Confirm size constraints:
- The table upload UI supports up to 10 files with a combined size under 2 GB in a single operation.
Option B: Upload the file to a Unity Catalog volume, then create a table from it (robust and flexible)
- Upload your CSV to a UC volume (any format is allowed for volumes; UI uploads are limited to 5 GB per file).
- From Catalog Explorer, click the file and use Create table to convert it into a managed table with the same preview and configuration options (headers, delimiter, types) as the upload page.
