{"id":110816,"date":"2017-04-10T07:07:04","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T14:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/flow-of-the-week-creating-appointments-from-excel-table\/"},"modified":"2017-04-10T07:07:04","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T14:07:04","slug":"flow-of-the-week-creating-appointments-from-excel-table","status":"publish","type":"power-automate","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/flow-of-the-week-creating-appointments-from-excel-table\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginner | Flow of the Week: Creating appointments from an Excel table"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello Flow Community!<\/p>\n

Today I am going to create a flow to address an actual business need from one of our customers.\u00a0This question came from the Microsoft Flow Subreddit<\/a>\u00a0and was asked like this:<\/p>\n

Hi there! I would like to make a flow, that uses Excel and Outlook meetings. When\u00a0I schedule a meeting in Outlook,\u00a0I want some of the text from the text field, to transfer to our budget, that we have in Excel. Alternatively, if that isn’t possible, I want to write the customer’s information in our budget Excel, and then have it send out a meeting invitation, with text pulled from the Excel sheet<\/em><\/p>\n

\u200bI’m going to go ahead and use his second option<\/strong> – Alternatively, if that isn’t possible, I want to write the customer’s information in our budget Excel, and then have it send out a meeting invitation, with text pulled from the Excel sheet<\/em><\/p>\n

\u200b<\/em>\u200bFirst things first — we are going to need to set up our Excel sheet properly. I asked the user to send me the sheet he uses for his budget tracking, removed all the data, and then converted it to a table.<\/p>\n

Here is the sample sheet<\/a> we are using for this Flow. Get familiar with it a bit before you dive into the rest of this tutorial and if you’re going to follow along, make sure to host it in OneDrive so it can be accessed in the cloud.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Open the Microsoft Flow portal<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  2. Click on My Flows<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  3. Click on Create From Blank<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  4. Since Excel has actions and not triggers, we\u2019re going to work around that by using the trigger type Recurrence<\/strong> and then setting it to check our Excel file every 1 hour.\n

    <\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  5. Add a new step into your flow and now choose Excel and the action Get Rows.\u00a0<\/strong>Select your Excel file and the proper table within it.\n

    <\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  6. Add a new step to your Flow. Choose Apply to each<\/strong> and select Value<\/strong> from your Excel dynamic content.\u00a0(This\u00a0tells our flow “for every row that contains X do the action Y”, which we will define next.)\n

    <\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  7. Now let’s create the\u00a0conditions that will send the actual meeting invite based off the sheet. For the\u00a0Object name, select the Dynamic content item Confirmation sent<\/strong> from our Excel sheet,\u00a0then select Is equal to<\/strong>\u00a0from the dropdown menu and set the\u00a0value to\u00a0No.<\/strong>\u00a0(This tells the flow to check if this column has a Yes or No within it, and if it has a No, to take the action outlined below.)<\/li>\n
  8. Now,\u00a0under the box that says IF YES<\/strong>,\u00a0lets add a new step to our flow. Choose Office 365 Outlook, select the action Create Event V2,<\/strong> and fill in all the necessary sections with dynamic content from our columns in our Excel table. This creates the appointment and maps your Excel columns to fields in the appointment and email.\n

    <\/p>\n

    \tAnd now finally, lets add a step that updates that Excel column to say YES\u00a0for Confirmation sent<\/strong> once the appointment has been sent. This way it doesn’t send again the next time it checks.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  9. Add a step to your flow and search for Excel. Add the action Update row<\/strong>, select your same spreadsheet and table we have already been working with, and fill in the Confirmation Sent<\/strong>\u00a0row with a Yes. <\/strong>For every other column use the dynamic content item associated with it like shown here:\n

    <\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And voila! Just like that, you can fill out your budget tracking spreadsheet and let flow set your meeting time, invitees, what\u2019s said in the appointment email and more! This is the beauty of Flow: if you have a unique need like this one, there is likely a solution that you can create to save yourself time and energy!<\/p>\n

    If you want us to create a Flow for your company or for your problem, let us know on the\u00a0Microsoft Flow Community<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, or here in the comments!<\/p>\n

    Thanks for reading!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Today I am going to create a flow to address an actual business need from one of our customers: “I want to write the customer’s information in our budget Excel, and then have it send out a meeting invitation, with text pulled from the Excel sheet”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":348,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","power-automate-category":[2590],"power-automate-tag":[2579,2591],"coauthors":[2899],"class_list":["post-110816","power-automate","type-power-automate","status-publish","hentry","power-automate-category-flow-of-the-week","power-automate-tag-excel","power-automate-tag-flow-of-the-week"],"yoast_head":"\nBeginner | Flow of the Week: Creating appointments from an Excel table - Microsoft Power Platform Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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