ArcGIS Pro Join Table error

[GerryShisler5]

I receive an "ERROR 001706 cannot join table to itself" message when trying to join a Gdb feature attribute to an Excel table.  These are two seperate files, however the Gdb file appears to be "locked" onto the Gdb when attempting to join the two.

How is this join lock removed, allowing to join features to excel tables.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Use the Excel to Table tool and make a geodatabase table to use for the join.  Things work better when Excel is only used as a source and destination for files and not part of a process like a join.  You can get away with it sometimes, but not when you really need it to.

[GerryShisler5]

Thanks Dan. That worked.

I understand ArcGIS Pro no longer reads MS Access because of the 64 bit architecture.  Does the same apply to Excel?

[DanPatterson_Retired]

It does support Excel Gerry, but there are way too many posts where things "go wrong" when trying to work with excel files directly.

Excel to Table, and Table to Excel are pretty good at fixing things up.

The problem with Excel is that …

• you can have spaces and crud in field names
• you can have blank rows
• you can have blanks in columns
• you can have mixed data types in columns
• whatever else I missed

Given all that, I would only use Excel if someone gave me a file in that format and I had to use it

I create all my tables in PRO or in numpy