We have always worked with standalone tables in arcmap and never had problems when these tables were updated, instantly changes were reflected in our map. However, now in arcgis pro we are not able to work as the same way, standalone table can't be updated, we must export to a layer or gdb to change something, this way we lose changes in our native excel files, would be better if directly we could change excel file. Thanks in advance
from Edit an active table—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation
Some tables are not editable, such as text files (.xls, .xlsx, .txt, and .csv, for example). These tables are read-only when they are in a map.
and Work with Microsoft Excel files in ArcGIS Pro—Excel | Documentation
Once the table is added to the map, you can open it in the Contents pane. However, you cannot edit the table or export records to an Excel format.
and there is a big section towards the bottom on limitations
Thank you so much Dan, your help is really appreciated. It seems .xls are read-only files, however, further investigating, if we use "Make xy event layer" tool from a .csv, it's allowed to update any row in this .csv and see this change reflected straight away in our map without exporting anything.
Regards
Why would editing tables be taken away? I hope we can see this added back in Pro. Very common to use xls and csv tables and there are many business reasons to retain those formats for data. For one, gdb is not an open format like shapefiles are.