put your tables in a geodatabase and this error should go away (but will copy to arcgis online)-
To do this, do I turn the excel into shape first through X, Y?
NO just load the table into your geodatabase through the catalog
oin your tables to your feature and export to a new shapefile with the attributes included
join it with the shape file ?
-Yes
-use XY coordinates to create the feature and export to a shapefile for loading
I did this, and it still had the error.
-Did you export to a shapefile, because just displaying events does not actually create data