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I am importing an Excel table with X/Y coordinates to plot on a map (point data).

The original Excel table has a header row as its top row..The row is 'frozen' in Excel.

When I import the table and view it in ArcMap (10), the header row of the original Excel sheet is gone, and the first feature row is now the header row in ArcMap.

How can I avoid this?

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    I have always had trouble with Arcgis and Excel in general. One thing I have started doing is to first import the tables into a geodatabase. this seems to put the data in a nice format for Arcmap and allows you to dictate the field types. – dave_does_not_understand Dec 17 '14 at 18:30
  • ncie thought, didn't work though... – JasonBK Dec 17 '14 at 21:01
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    I am not able to replicate this issue with ArcGIS Desktop 10.0 SP4. A 'frozen' header field displays correctly when dragging and dropping the Sheet into map, exporting table to a feature class, and/or Creating Feature Class From XY Table. – Adam Dec 17 '14 at 21:04
  • I've tried all those thing as well, with the same results..I havn't seen this before...I also checked for illegal characters etc in field names but they all look fine... – JasonBK Dec 17 '14 at 21:09
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    Try exporting the Excel to a csv file first, or dbf if the field names are short enough. – recurvata Dec 17 '14 at 21:29
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I had the same problem (Arcmap would not import my csv file with headers, instead it would show Field1, Field2, Field3 etc). When I examined the file headers in Excel, I found...decimals numbers, spaces, percent signs etc. After replacing all of that with underscores or text, I had no problems. I dragged the .csv file into arcmap, opened the attribute table and all the headers were displayed perfectly.

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    Marissa is correct. If you have columns in your CSV or Excel file that are numbers, they will read as data rather than field names in ArcMap. You can rename them in Excel, and that should work (e.g. if you have 2016, you could rename as year_2016). – sarahbellum Apr 18 '17 at 19:57
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For me, it was because one of my headers was just a 0. ArcGis doesn't like it when a header begins with a number. I just added an N in front of the 0 and it imported fine.

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If your file is an .xls or .xlsx file these should open correctly in ArcMap. Clearly this isn't happening though, but my experience of using Excel is that it simply stuffs up csv exporting and the resulting file isn't usable.

Does opening the .xls or .xlsx file in LibreOffice Calc then saving as a text csv (with commas as a field separator) and importing into ArcMAP do this correctly?

This is based on my own experience of using Excel and the solution to this similar question: ArcGIS 10.2.1 is not recognising my CSV file headings

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I just ran into issues with Arc moving headers around but leaving the data in place below the headers when importing csv census data.

I got around the issue by saving the table as a tab delimited .txt file instead.

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