Searching for a specific row in multiple excel files

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am quite new in building Flows and I have managed to figure out the basic needs for my team at work, but there is one thing that would make our lives much easier, unfortunately, I can't figure out how to set the flow or if it is even possible.

We are a team of 25 people and we are all using our own excel "request tracker" it is saved on our share drive so the boss can keep finding who did which ticket. We thought it would be enough to just ask in chat, so the boss does not have to go through each file separately, but sometimes people are offline/on vacation and therefore they would not respond.

So my question is, is it possible to build a flow, that would search through all the excel files for a specific row? The excels are formatted more or less the same way and I would need it to search based on a private number of employee (column number 4) or last name (column number 5 and preferably name too column number 6), and then copy the column from the file where it is to somewhere where my boss could easily see who worked on that. The private number is never the same unless two people were working on different things for the same person so it could search for more results, but that is alright as long as we don't have to go through hundreds of rows in 25 files. The last name and name is very often the same for different people, so the number would work better in my opinion.

I hope I explained well, as I said, I am quite new. I would appreciate any help or suggestions on how to do this differently - my other idea was to transfer the excels to SharePoint list, and have it done automatically that each new row that we will write in any document would transfer there, so my boss would only have to search in one file, but honestly, I did not figure that out either properly.

Thank you!

[edgonzales]

@Anonymous 

Hi there!  So, I have some questions...

But first, the process as I understand it:  You have a team of 25 people who are all managing their own, individual "request tracker" spreadsheet, but they are in a communal share drive, correct?  (I'm picturing a shared folder with 25 different spreadsheets).

To find out details, though, your boss needs to ask a general "who has this thing?" and wait for the right people to chime in with details, ya?

If all that's correct so far, there are a bunch of different directions you could go to improve things.  Answering the immediate issue, though, maybe we can chase things upstream and automate a thing that updates a list of who has which issue and status and dates and things.  Maybe even a link to the individual spreadsheet.

What do you think?

-Ed

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[Anonymous]

Hello!

Yes, that is exactly it. 25 different Excel files in a folder on the company share drive. And yes, whenever our boss (or basically anyone from the team) is looking for something, she asks in team chat (Microsoft Teams) and then it is just a waiting game, especially now, since we are all on homeoffice.

I provided a temporary solution - Microsoft form -> answers go to the SharePoint list and that goes to Excel file which is updated every time someone opens it. However, this solution is not great, because people have to write the data into the form and into their personal trackers, so if there is a way to do it without everyone doing the same things twice, that'd be awesome!

Thank you!