Reading Information from an Excel Table and then sending an Approval Request

[sphenna]

Hello,

I would like to build a flow where information is read from an Excel Table and then sent in an approval. I have an excel table which has columns for the Approval Subject, a file path, and the email address of the person the approval should be sent to. I would like to be able to manually start a flow which reads the email addresses and sends individual approval requests to those emails, with the correct file linked and the subject of the approval included. 

I am not sure how to do this, most solutions I have seen involve using flow in Excel, but there doesn't seem to be a way to automatically enter the email - that seems to be done manually.

Also, ideally, if the approval request is approved, I would like that result to automatically update in a column of the Excel Table to say "Approved". 

Any help is much appreciated!

[SudeepGhatakNZ]

@sphenna ,

Would you like a sample? Just a question, why aren't you using a SharePoint list instead of Excel?

[v-yetonggu-msft]

Hi @sphenna ,

I did a test for your reference.

In my scenario:

My Excel Table:

My Approcal Subject is unique, no duplicate values.

My Flow:

I use the ‘Approval Subjec’t as the primary key for updating rows (the primary key requires uniqueness, that is, there cannot be duplicate values. My Approval Subject is unique, so I use it as the primary key).

Approval:

Best Regards,

Sunshine Gu

[sphenna]

Thanks, a sample would be great. I'm using an Excel sheet because that is what the department in my company uses. If it would be much easier to do this, I could look into converting this into a SharePoint list.

[sphenna]

Thank you this works, however, there is one small problem - it seems that this solution only sends one approval at a time, and will not send the next approval until the first one is answered. I would ideally like all the approvals to go out at the same time, because they will be sent to different people and will not be related to answers to other approvals.

[v-yetonggu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @sphenna ,

Please turn on the apply to each action's concurrency control and try again:

Best Regards,

Sunshine Gu

[v-yetonggu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @sphenna ,

If you want to send approval to everyone in a SharePoint list and update the approval results to the 'Approval' column of the list, please use the When an item is created trigger.

When you create a new item, it will be sent Approval to the email address and then update the 'Approval' column of the item so you don't get stuck waiting.

I did another test for your reference.

In my scenario:

My SharePoint List:

My Flow:

The Result:

Best Regards,

Sunshine Gu

[sphenna]

Great, thank you!