Create items in SharePoint list from data in excel file

[sunithav]

Hello Power Automate Community,

I have created a flow to read data from excel and create items in SharePoint list. File has 10k records and the import process involves calculation of count. Flows imports data as expected however it takes lot of time. It took nearly 2hr to import 1800 items. I see no improvement in performance of the flow even when tried with parallel branch with each branch processing less than 2000 records. Data import will happen on a daily basis, records get added,updated and deleted from the excel file.

Looking for a better way to process the records. Could someone please help? 

Sample Data in Excel File  

Brand

HP

Dell

HP

HP

Dell

SharePoint List 

Brand	Count
HP	3
Dell	2

Thanks,

SV

[PrasadAthalye]

What kind of calculations are you doing? Can you upload flow picture?

[v-litu-msft]

Hi @sunithav,

Have you tried to turn on the concurrency control and turn up the degree of parallelism? For example, it could turn up to 50 to let 50 rows run at the same time:

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
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[sunithav]

@PrasadAthalye , Flow is expected to group the items by a column and get the total count and update the count for each item in the list.  Sample input and expected output is as per below.

Sample Data in Excel File  

Brand

HP

Dell

HP

HP

Dell

SharePoint List 

Brand	Count
HP	3
Dell	2

[PrasadAthalye]

So in essential, you only write counts in SharePoint list OR all the entries and then group them in a view?

If you are interested in group by counts only, can you group them in excel in another tab and just populate from that tab?

[RobElliott]

@sunithav you can do this quite easily with a Switch control as you are only looking at one thing, the brand.

So your excel spreadsheet table initially looks like this:

You can then trigger the flow manually as I've done, or on a recurrence schedule. We then create an integer variable for each of the brands you are dealing with. Next we get the list of rows in the spreadsheet.

Next, add an Apply to each and select value from the dynamic content box. So for each row in the table....

We then add a Switch and enter the brand in the "On" field. Then whenever it finds that brand it increments the variable we created for that brand by 1.

I don't know if you want to do this step but I deleted all the items in my current list of brands and numbers:

Finally we create an item in the SharePoint list, using the variable for that company:

The result in the SharePoint list looks like this:

Hope that helps.

Rob
Los Gallardos
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[sunithav]

@PrasadAthalye, Thanks for the inputs. We would like to avoid the manual work to the extent that its possible and importing data from excel is everyday activity. 

[sunithav]

@v-litu-msft, Thanks for the response. I tried parallel branch with each branch processing close to 2k records and flow ran for more than 3 days.  

[RobElliott]

@sunithav then instead of manually starting the flow, use a recurrence schedule trigger and have it run once a day, or once every 4 hours or whatever you need.

Rob
Los Gallardos
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[RobElliott]

@sunithav why did you use a parallel branch, there wasn't one in the solution I gave you in an earlier post.

Rob
Los Gallardos
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[sunithav]

@RobElliott, Thanks for the response detailing the flow steps.

The requirement is to group records by a user account and file has 10k records. So Switch case will not work for me. 

The sample data that I mentioned in the question was just for explanation purpose. Please excuse if this has caused any confusion. 

Its a scheduled flow and not triggered manually. Only manual step here is to upload the excel file to SharePoint document library once every day. 

I tried parallel branch last week before I posted this question and flows has been running ever since then till I cancelled it manually.

Thanks,

SV