Downloading File with importrange function failing - think it's a bug

Question

I\'ve been saving Google Sheets to Excel without any problems for a while. These sheets have always successfully saved and opened in Excel with the importrange function. However

Answer 1

Until this bug is fixed, a workaround is to put a data validation (Data > Data Validation) on the imported data (Any kind of data validation will do).

Answer 2

I'm thinking it's a bug too.

Workarounds

On Excel

• Copy and paste as values only the ranges with IFERROR(__xludf.DUMMYFUNCTION(..., then use Excel's UI tools to convert numbers shown as text to numbers.
• Selectively remove quotes on the IFERROR second argument of the cells causing problems
• Remove =IFERROR(__xludf.DUMMYFUNCTION(),"value") except value (we could use Excel's built-in FIND & REPLACE for this)

On Google Sheets

• Use Copy > Paste as values only on the range areas having formulas with non-compatible functions like IMPORTRANGE, QUERY, FILTER, etc.
• If you only need the values, download it as CSV instead of XLSX

IMPORTANT

In order to help to prioritize this issue, send feedback to Google. To do this open a Google Sheets spreadsheet, click on Help > Report a problem, then fill the feedback form and submit it.

Related stuff

I posted 5 small articles about this in Spanish. You could find them listed on https://www.rubenrivera.mx/p/descargar-hcg-excel.html.