{"id":110985,"date":"2018-11-14T05:30:19","date_gmt":"2018-11-14T13:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/convert-pdf-with-microsoft-flow-nov-2018\/"},"modified":"2018-11-14T05:30:19","modified_gmt":"2018-11-14T13:30:19","slug":"convert-pdf-with-microsoft-flow-nov-2018","status":"publish","type":"power-automate","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/convert-pdf-with-microsoft-flow-nov-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Advanced | Flow of The Week: Convert Office documents to PDF on the fly using Microsoft Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whats up Flow Fans!\u00a0<\/p>\n

This week we have a special FOTW From one of our MVP’s – Paul Culmsee!<\/p>\n

Paul Culmsee (@paulculmsee<\/a>) is a management and technology consultant, Microsoft MVP and award winning author from Perth, Western Australia. He co-founded Seven Sigma Business Solutions (http:\/\/www.sevensigma.com.au\u00a0<\/a>) and specialises in sensemaking, helping organisations (re)discover their purpose, knowledge management, strategic planning, IT governance, facilitation and all facets of SharePoint and Office365 delivery<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Sympathy for the on-site technician<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Hi everyone.<\/p>\n

Imagine a company where service technicians perform on-site repair of equipment. Inevitably, in doing this sort of work, the technician will need to refer to equipment drawings, service history, past photos, specifications and\/or operating manuals.<\/p>\n

These days PowerApps is fast-becoming a great option for such a scenario because many field workers prefer to use their phone or a tablet. I have made many apps like this and PowerApps is a great solution for this use-case. But PowerApps also has some limitations, and right now that is around the display of documents from SharePoint. For a start, it is impossible to display office documents natively in PowerApps at this time, and there are authentication-related issues in certain circumstances when pulling content from SharePoint.<\/p>\n

But fear not\u2026 with a 6-step flow, it is possible to solve this problem. This flow allows a remote user to securely request a document from SharePoint, but importantly, converts that document to a PDF on the fly<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There are two big benefits from this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A reduction in time and effort for document controllers. If a document frequently changes, it is most likely in word, excel or PowerPoint format. They do not have to worry about converting it to PDF.<\/li>\n
  2. It allows the document to be viewed in PowerApps natively (As a result of #2, on top of some Flow kung-fu, we will learn some PowerApp tricks in this article too :-).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now in the (admittedly large article to follow, I go into detail on how to set this up, but if you prefer to see this in video form, we also have you covered\u2026<\/p>\n