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Issues with Power Automate pulling data from Planner

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Posted on by geo97

Hi everyone,

I'm writing this post because I created a Power Automate flow to extract data from Microsoft Planner and put it in an Excel spreadsheet.

My issue is related to the Task IDs generated by Planner and collected by my flow.

I have several planners, each has several tasks. Three of my planners work perfectly, my Power Automate flow is capable of extracting all the data I need, but I have some issues with three other planners.

When Power Automate collects the Task IDs associated to each task I have, they look like this: GkRA3kT9ZjzYAoE4chvJKrGuvz_

But I don't know why, sometimes, I get the error #NAME? in Excel instead for the task ID pasted by my flow.

I checked the formula bar in Excel and realized that the flow adds "=-" before the task ID which results in this error message.

Do you know why this happens? It happens for some task IDs but not all of them. Any idea?

Thank you very much for your help

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trice602 15,890 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @geo97 ,

As you know the "=", "+", and "-" in Excel represents the start of a formula and the root cause is when the task ID is randomly generated, it looks like sometimes it starts with a math operator which creates issues. One easy route is to add a compose and simply concat() your taskID with a value. In this example, I added an "A_" to all my tasks to prevent this from happening, shown below.

concat('A_',items('Apply_to_each')?['id'])

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wskinnermctc 6,519 Moderator on at

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You could start the taskId with a single ' quote.

When there is a leading single ' quote excel will treat everything as text and not attempt to create a formula.

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geo97 14 on at

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I completely forgot about that.

Here is the part of my flow that I use to pull data from Planner.

How can I make sure that it adds a ' quote when pasting the task id to excel? Should I write it in the "Expression" part? Something like ='?

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wskinnermctc 6,519 Moderator on at

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I would try just putting the single ' quote in front of the dynamic content and see if it will accept it like that.

If that doesn't work, then you will have to concatenate the single quote with the dynamic content in an expression. But since the single quote has to be used in the expression it will have to be double escaped.

It will be something like:

concat('''',{dynamic content})

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geo97 14 on at

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It seems to be working :), no more error message

Thanks

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