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Multiple flows concurrently adding rows in excel OneDrive (Business)

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Posted on by carhur61

Hi,

I have a situation in which multiple flows (41) are adding rows into the same Excel Table. Each flow is a MS Forms quiz filled at any time by students and concurrency might occur. I'm getting many GatewayTimeout errors.

Is concurrency what is causing the errors? Is flow concurrency possible in Excel at all? If the answer is no, how is it possible to work around it?

Please Help!

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ScottShearer 25,270 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@carhur61

You could try going to the settings for the Excel action and changing the retry policy - increase the number or retries. Other than that I don't believe there is much that you can do.

I suggest re-writing your Flows so that they add rows to a SharePoint list instead of Excel. Then, if you want the data in Excel, have a recurrence Flow periodically add any new rows added to the SharePoint list to the Excel table.

Alternatively, simply have Excel use the SharePoint list as a data source and set the Excel workbook to update upon opening.

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carhur61 16 on at

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Thank you for your reply @ScottShearer.

It's a fact that we have to migrate to Dataverse or SharePoint very soon.

What I want to do is to implement a quick fix to avoid the errors and buy some time until migration is complete. I wonder if after increasing the number of retries, with more flows retrying to drop the data, the problem would be bigger.

Is it possible for the flow to detect if the file is being used and add a delay?

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carhur61 16 on at

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For the short term I took two of the key tables in my Excel file and moved them to separate files. That lowered the pressure. I decided not to work with SharePoint because my long-term solution is to migrate all tables to Dataverse which already started. Excel was a really quick and easy fix for the short term.

Thank you very much for your reply

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