Get row number from excel node "Get rows from sheet"

[felx]

Hello n8n community!

This is actually my very first post here, and I’m super excited to be part of this fast-growing community!

I’ve been exploring n8n for about two weeks now, and honestly it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made. Tasks that used to take me around 8 hours now take just 1 hour with n8n. It’s incredible! I’m really looking forward to seeing all the amazing things everyone is building, and of course, to keep building cool stuff myself.

My question:
In the Google Sheets node, the node response includes a row number that I can later use to map updates to the correct row in the sheet. I tried relying on other fields, but that gave me around 60% “no data input” errors, the row number gave 100% success.

Since I’m already paying for Microsoft 365 Business, I thought (and please correct me if I’m wrong) that it might be smarter to use Excel instead, maybe because of better rate limits, API calls, and general performance than using a normal personal google account?

Here’s the issue, though: I can’t seem to find the row number in the Excel node to use as a reference?

Bonus question:
Is there a way to fetch rows from an Excel sheet and filter them, like in the Google Sheets node? For example, filtering on something like created = no? Right now, I’m pulling entire lists with 8,000 rows, and my VM on Google Cloud is really struggling with that and crashing 9 out of 10 times hehe…

[krisn0x]

Hey!

In the Excel node, there is no direct row number like in Google Sheets, instead, use a unique identifier (can be an ID column) to map and update rows reliably.

For filtering, the Excel node does not support server-side filtering like Google Sheets. You need to fetch the rows and then filter them within n8n using Filter or If nodes to reduce data before processing.

To decrease the load on the VM, limit how many rows the node can pull. Since the node itself doesn’t support this with pagination, I would suggest using the Microsoft Graph API calls via HTTP Request node if the files are stored on OneDrive or Sharepoint.

[felx]

Hey @krisn0x, thanks for your response! Okay, then I’m up to speed. For what I’m trying to do, I might stick with Google Sheets for now and maybe switch later on. You’d think Microsoft Excel would have these features instead of Google, since they were first on the ball with spreadsheets… oh well, thanks again!