This is a question that has long confounded us newbies to ARcmap in our group. Whenever we 'add data' an excel spreadsheet to a map's active frame we get errors if we have any spaces, characters like % etc. in the header row. So we end up 'cleaning' many columns and trying and trying before we are successful. I think that a powerful and popular application like ArcMap wouldnt be bothered by such characters and spaces as most spreadsheets have them and they are often necessary. So what are we doing wrong? Maybe there's something we dont know?
Any help would be much appreciated.
thanks a lot.
Helga
The 'rules' for naming conventions in Arc* products and in general
https://community.esri.com/blogs/dan_patterson/2016/08/14/filenames-and-file-paths-in-python
Enjoy while learning...
Sometimes 'understanding' of the rules needs to be put aside for a time and 'acceptance' substituted in its place
When you then have time, you can revisit the 'rule' that you don't understand and study why it is there, when does it apply and whether there are workarounds.