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Sending data from an excel document to PVA User

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Posted on by Mt1983

Hi,

I've created a PVA to capture data in excel via Power Automate which is working successfully. However now I want to be able to return an Accepted/Rejected message back to the user once the information has been verified on the excel document.

Does anyone know a way of pushing the information back to an individual user? using Automate/PVA.

Many thanks

Michael

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Mt1983 22 on at

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Re: Sending data from an excel document to PVA User

Thanks both that's been really helpful. Appreciate your time 🙂
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MattJimison 577 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Sending data from an excel document to PVA User

Agreed with @Pstork1 on this likely being an asynchronous process to validate the file, and so you wouldn't want your Flow to wait on it to finish before it responded back to PVA, because PVA will time out after 99 seconds.

There are options, though. You can return back values from Power Automate to PVA, but have the Flow still otherwise continue on afterwards. There are also a lot more user variables in the new Unified canvas, so you can work with more than just the user's ID and/or display name (see picture at bottom for reference)

I'd recommend looking at the following options for communicating back to the user when the validation is complete: (choosing what works best for you and your users)

Use the "Post message in a chat or channel" Teams action to post the response back to the user in the conversation with the bot (you do this by selecting "Post As: Power Virtual Agents (Preview)" and selecting the respective bot and user)
Use the "Post message in a chat or channel" Teams action to post a message directly to the user via the Flowbot (you do this by selecting "Post As: Flow bot")
Send an email to the user via an Outlook action in Power Automate

With all of the above, you can reference the user email address via User.Email.

Find this post helpful? Please mark it as the solution and/or provide kudos so that it will help others in the future.

Cheers,
Matt
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Pstork1 66,176 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Sending data from an excel document to PVA User

Assuming you are using Teams or Azure AD authentication for the Bot, then you can capture the user's account name from the Bot when they submit the information and store that in the Excel spreadsheet. You can then use that account name as their email address to have Power Automate send an email to the user when the items are approved. Its unlikely that the BOT would still be open if you are going through an approval process so you would need to send the message back by email.