Data loaded from source files

Data factory makes life easier to process multiple source files e.g. where the source system is not accessible and reports have to be used to extract the data or in one case where all the different offices had their own system and the data ended up being loaded from manual spreadsheets.

Excel format files

These are not supported in data factory but it’s fairly easy to just save these as text files e.g. csv files or tab delimited files watch out for saving excel as tab delimited if unicode characters or non standard language sets in the source system – tab delimited is not unicode….

Blob Storage

Push the files up into blob storage and then add shared access signature keys and process all the files in one go.