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Issue in "Get Tables" for Excel connector

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Hi,

I am facing an issue while creating a flow and I am hoping to find a solution here.

Flow: The flow is triggered when an email with an attachment is received in an outlook mailbox. The attachment is always an excel file which must be stored to a destination in sharepoint. The flow is working good up until this point. After saving the attachment in a sharepoint location, the contents of the excel file should be copied and then pasted to a different excel file. The problem that I am facing is while using the Excel "Get Tables" connector ("Get Rows is not available'). The file name field does not allow a dynamic file name value so you have to manually select the location of the filename which you must write the contents of the original excel file to. The problem here is that the flow works fine the first time but the second time it fails giving an error "The file is locked by the user (My own username)".

I have tried introducing a delay but it did not work. I have heard that replacing Sharepoint with OneDrive will work but for the task that I want to automate will need Sharepoint.I have tried searching online but I have found no other similar issue that might help me solve mine. Let me know if you guys know of a solution to this problem. Flow issue report 1.PNG Floe issue report 2.PNG Flow issue report 3.PNG

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Re: Issue in "Get Tables" for Excel connector

Hi @ScottShearer ,

I will try this out. Thanks a lot for this.

Regards,
@Anonymous
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ScottShearer 25,228 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Issue in "Get Tables" for Excel connector

@Anonymous

Here is something to try - see my example below.

The example attempts to demonstrate how to loop until the Excel action is successful. See the run after configuration on the actions following the Excel action. The variable that I declare is a Boolean and is initialized to false. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Community Power Pla... on at

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Re: Issue in "Get Tables" for Excel connector

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your response but I tried with a delay of 10 minutes and 15 minutes and was still getting the same error, i.e. "File is locked". and the test for that particular flow ran for over an hour. I am not sure how the file would still be locked after waiting for that long. Pease, let me know if there is any other way to do this. Thanks.

@ScottShearer
ScottShearer 25,228 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Issue in "Get Tables" for Excel connector

@Anonymous

You might try setting your delay to a value over 6 minutes.

The following is from the documentation for the GetTables action:

Known Issues and Limitations

The maximum size of an Excel file that is supported by the Excel Online (Business) connector is 25 MB.

The data may not be up to date (there may be some delay) when filtering or sorting is used in the List rows present in a table action.

The List rows present in a table action supports basic filtering and sorting:

Supports the following filter functions: eq, ne, contains, startswith, endswith.

Only 1 filter function can be applied on a column.

Only 1 column can be used for sorting.

An Excel file may be locked for an update or delete up to 6 minutes since the last use of the connector.

A single Excel file should be used by a single connection to prevent writing data from multiple connections and possible data inconsistency.

The connector supports files only in Microsoft Excel Open XML Spreadsheet format (*.xlsx).