Dynamic way to check if excel table have any empty cell using Power Automate

[ashwanidv100]

Hello, I'm creating a Power Automate to track the email received with Attachment.

Where the Attachment will be an Excel file with Define Table on worksheet. I need to check if all the data is filled in worksheet table  properly or not.

Means No columns and and rows should have any blank cell within defined table. 

The table is having more than 10 columns and rows and that can grow from 100 to 1000s, it depends. I want to check if there's no blank cell available but if that happens then I need to revert back on the email to sender asking to resend the excel with all details asked.

Is there a way to find optimal way to do this. I have reached to Parse JSON. So I can tap to more granular level. But what would be the next possible steps or what else we can do to track this quickly using Power Automate.

[grantjenkins]

Few questions:

1. When you say thousands of rows - what would the maximum number of rows be?
2. Would it be the same columns each time?
3. Would you be able to show an example of a couple of rows including all 10 columns?

[ashwanidv100]

@grantjenkins , 

My response is based on current situation. 

Answers to your FAQ:

1. As these excels that we are collecting from some of our 9k vendors and rows will be varying from each vendors. But we don't have clarity and these data collects employees info who are working for us under some contracta that we have with them. 

2. YES, we have same template to share with our 9k Vendors. 

3. These columns collect some employees sensitive info and consist of single and multi line texts and numbers. Won't be able to show as it's government related ask with signed NDA. But I hope the response give the gist of it. 

My current working approach: using Filter array (advance mode) applied after Parse JSON action. Where using OR condition on all the 10 columns in the worksheet table to see if value is blank or empty string (''). And then checking it's array length. And if array length is 0 then it means.. Worksheet table doesn't have any blank values in any of the columns for each record. 

But I'm still evaluating the better and optimal approach that we could take for this case. 

[grantjenkins]

You can try the following which would avoid having to use an Apply to each. Note that I'm just using a manual trigger. I'm assuming you've already worked out how to get the Excel file from your email and listed the rows.

There may be an easier way to do this using Office Scripts for example, but this should work fairly well for your scenario. The longest part of the flow would be retrieving the rows from Excel.

For this example, I'm using the following Excel Table that contains a couple of missing items.

Below is the full flow. I'll go into each of the actions.

List rows present in a table will retrieve the data from my Excel Table. Note that by default, this will only return a maximum of 256 rows. If you want to retrieve more than this, you will need to go into the Settings, turn on Pagination, and set a Threshold larger than the number of items you expect to ever return from a Vendor.

Next, we use a Select to concatenate our items, separating them with ####. This means that when a value is missing it will end up joining the #### together giving us ######## which we can filter on to find out if there are any missing items.

The Select uses the output (value) from List rows present in a table and uses a concat expression to join the values together.

//You would need to add all 10 of your fields. You also need to ensure you have #### at the start and end as below.

concat('####', item()?['Name'], '####', item()?['Amount'], '####', item()?['Year'], '####')

If we ran the flow now, we would see the following output from the Select. You will see that there are ######## next to each of the values that were missing. If no values were missing, then we would only ever see ####.

[
  "####Alpha####20####2022####",
  "####Beta####3####2023####",
  "####Gamma########2021####",
  "########20####2022####",
  "####Romeo####18####2023####"
]

Filter array uses the output from our Select and uses a filter to check if any items contain ########. The expression used here is:

item()

We can then check the length of the Filter array to see if there are any items (length is greater than 0). If so, there must have been at least one missing value. The expression used is:

length(body('Filter_array'))

If there was at least one item, we go into the Yes branch and send our email informing the Vendor that there are missing values. I'm not sure where you get the Vendor email from - in this example, it's just sending to me.

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