Get data from an excel that is being created in the same flow

[Anonymous]

Greetings, 

Im tying to create an excel sheet which i send a like to a friend. Said friend then has 30 days time to edit the excel sheet until he is satisfied and if he is done i want to continue the flow. My Question is how do i best do that ? 

i tried to do a do while with a delay of 30 min which is checking if a box is set to "Ja" but i just dont know how i get the value of set box.

ok so as you can see im creating an excel sheet which i name, then im waiting 5 seconds just to be sure before i create and send a Link to my friend so he can edit the sheet.

after that im trying to acces the excel sheet with said name.

and if that would work i would want to get the info from the table "Bearbeitung fertig" which just has one line and check if it says "ja" or "Nein" so i can end the do while and continue with my flow.

sadly i always get a bad request/invallidrequest.

is there a better way for me to acces a file i just created within the same flow or is that even possible ? 

thanks for your time and help

Linsu

[rzaneti]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Could you please share your 'List rows present in a table' action in edit mode, so we can see the inputs? Make sure to remove any sensitive data before sharing it 🙂

I'm suspecting that you are not passing the file reference and table reference as dynamic contents, which can be failing your flow. 

[Anonymous]

thats the List rows present table action no sensitive data to be seen 

[rzaneti · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

It looks like you are passing a table name into the action, instead of a table reference. To access an Excel table, Power Automate needs a "table id", and not the name itself. Let's fix it.

Documentation and reference links

Before start it, I'm sharing some useful links related to the topics discussed in this solution. It may be helpful for you or for any other users that find this thread and don't necessarily are comfortable with some Power Automate concepts:

• Official Docs - Get tables action: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/excelonlinebusiness/#get-tables  
• Official docs - Create file action: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/sharepointonline/#create-file 
• Official docs - Data operations (filter array): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/data-operations 
• Blog post - Using dynamic content in Power Automate: http://digitalmill.net/2023/07/31/using-dynamic-content-in-power-automate/  
• Blog post - Integrating Excel Tables and Power Automate: http://digitalmill.net/2023/07/17/integrating-power-automate-and-excel-tables/ 
• Blog post - Looping arrays in Power Automate: http://digitalmill.net/2023/07/12/using-loops-and-accessing-array-elements-in-power-automate/ 

Overview of the use case

To provide you with a step-by-step, I'm just copying an existing Excel file that contains 2 tables, named "Users" and "Table 2", and saving it somewhere else:

This is the table ('Table2') that I'm intending to access in this flow:

Step 1 - Get Excel tables from the new file

The just created Excel file will have the exact same content from the original one, keeping even its same table names. The id of these tables, however, will be different, so we need to capture them before accessing the tables. 

To achieve it, let's add a 'Get tables' action, which will return for us a list of the existing tables inside an Excel file. This action will bring both the table name and the table id. When populating the "File" input of the action, instead of add a file path, just insert the dynamic content corresponding to the id of the created file (highlighted in yellow):

Step 2 - Filter for the desired table

Now it's time to isolate the desired table, and we can do it by adding a 'Filter array' action, passing the body/value dynamic content as 'From' input. In the 'Filter Query', add the dynamic content of the property 'Name' (highlighted in blue), keep the comparison dropdown as 'is equal to' and set the table name in the right input (highlighted in yellow). For my example, I'm accessing the results from 'Table2':

Step 3 - Access your table values

The 'Filter array' will return a list with a single element, which is the table that matches to the name provided by you. Add a 'List rows present in a table' action, and populate the 'File' with the body/id dynamic content from your 'Create file' action, and the 'Table' with the id dynamic content of your 'Filter array' action (be careful to not pass the 'Get tables' id by accident):  

At this point, Power Automate will automatically allocate the 'List rows present in a table' action into a 'For each' loop: it happens because, as mentioned before, the 'Filter array' returns a list, so Power Automate needs to loop it to access each element (which, in this case, is only one).

Testing the flow

The flow runs successfully:

And as expected, it returns the values from the 'Table2':

Now you can move forward with the following actions in your flow 🙂

Let me know if it works for you or if you need any additional help!

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