When Sharing a Map from Excel, Maps for Office should use the column headings as Attribute names instead of as Aliases in the Feature Layer.*
I have a spreadsheet that has columns for lat/long coordinates along with columns containing URLs to photos. I can successfully create a web map using Maps for Office, and I can Share the Map to AGOL. But when I create a Story Map Tour from the web map, there are no photos or thumbnails associated with the map locations. Furthermore, if I manually add URLs that point to photos, they don't "stick" or persist. That is, if I Save the changes, then close and re-open the Story Map, the images are gone.
Esri support tells me it's because spreadsheet column headings are replaced with "f1", "f2", etc. and the column headings are relegated to being Aliases when the Feature Layer is created in Maps for Office. This is done, at least in part to prevent data corruption if there were duplicate column names. If that's the case, I think that a validation check should be performed before the Feature Layer is created. If found, duplicate headings could be appended with a "2," or "3," or illegal characters could be replaced with "_", or a null column heading could be named "null1," "null2," etc. Or at the very least, an error message should display describing the problem.
* You can see this in AGOL by going to the Item Details of the Feature Layer, select the 'Data' tab, click on any of the column headings, then select 'Show Detailed View.' You'll see that the 'Name' of the Attribute is listed as "f1", "f2", etc.
