Process Excel rows in Power Automate

You let Power Automate go through an Excel list and email a reminder only for tasks that are not done yet. You can use this pattern wherever data lives in Excel: schedules, order lists and checklists.

What do you need? An Excel file on OneDrive or SharePoint, not only on your own computer, and an Outlook mailbox.

First, a table in Excel

Power Automate only reads data that is formatted as a table in Excel. A loose sheet of cells does not work. Steps 1 and 2 below create that table.

Step by step

On your OneDrive, create an Excel file Tasks.xlsx with the columns Task, Owner, Deadline and Status. Fill in five rows. Set the status of a few tasks to Not done and the rest to Done.
Select all cells, choose Insert and then Table, and tick My table has headers. Under Table Design, name the table Tasks. Save the file and close it.
A table named Tasks in Excel. Tap the image to enlarge. It shows the Dutch interface.
In Power Automate, create an Instant cloud flow with the trigger Manually trigger a flow and name it Report open tasks.
Add the Excel Online (Business) action List rows present in a table. Under Location, choose your OneDrive (a long link that ends in your own name), under Document Library choose OneDrive, under File your file and under Table the table Tasks.
Choose the file and the table. Tap the image to enlarge. It shows the Dutch interface.
Add the action Apply to each (or For each) and, under Select an output from previous steps, choose the dynamic content value of the Excel action. That is the list of rows.
Inside the loop, add a Condition: on the left choose the column Status, in the middle is equal to, and type Not done on the right.
In True, add the action Send an email (V2). Send it to yourself, with the subject Open task and the dynamic content Task and Deadline in the body.
Save and test manually. You get one email for every task with the status Not done.
Open the run history and expand the loop. For each row you can see what happened.

More than 256 rows? By default the action retrieves at most 256 rows. Under Settings of the action, turn on Pagination and enter a higher number. Seeing a number like 46300 instead of a date? That is how Excel stores dates. In the action, choose ISO 8601 under Date Time Format for a readable date.

Process rows from an Excel table

First, a table in Excel

Step by step

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Process rows from an Excel table

First, a table in Excel

Step by step

Was this lesson helpful?

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