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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / close an Excel file on...
Power Automate
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close an Excel file on Sharepoint/OneDrive

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Posted on by 124

One of my colleagues has written a Power Automate script that populates an excel spreadsheet with some website URL's.  At the end, it calls Power Automate Desktop to visit the URL's and download data, populating the same spreadsheet.  We then have PAD import the spreadsheet to our task management system.  So far so good.... at the end, we want to open the spreadsheet in PAD and delete the data, leaving an empty table, ready to be populated by Power Automate (web) next time it runs.  The issue we have is that Poer Automate seems to be holding open the Excel file when it initially populates it, when PAD comes to delete the rows in the file it cant then sync the file and I get a OneDrive error.  Is there something I can put in Power Automate Web to close the excel file before calling the Power Automate desktop script?  BTW, I know it would have been easier to pass a data table from Web to Desktop rather than using an Excel file but they have built it this way, it works and its their first time using Power Automate so I dont really want to rip it all up and start passing tables between Web and Desktop unless it cant be helped!

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  • LG-14121324-0 Profile Picture
    3 on at
    I was facing similar issue: when I tried to process the same file twice, it was taking some time to allow processing the input file again and said that it was locked by the user.
    I solved it with these steps:
    1. Create the file
    2. Check-out the file and work on it
    3. Check-in the file as the last step of the flow
    I understand that Check-in releases the file, but you can only check-in a previously checked-out file, that's why you need to use that sequence: create, check-out, and check-in the file.
     
    I hope this helps.
     
    Luciano

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