Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello everyone,

I’m currently working on an automation in Power Automate Desktop, where I need to read data from an Excel file row by row and write values back into the same or another Excel sheet. I’ve encountered a frustrating issue where my flow works fine in the first loop iteration, but when it reaches the second iteration, I get an error that disconnects the Excel instance.

Here’s the situation:

Flow Setup:
- I open an Excel file and store the instance in a variable (let's call it %ExcelInstance%).
- I use a loop to iterate through a data table extracted from the Excel file. For each row, I write some data back to the Excel sheet. After that I export the sheet as PDF file.
- I’m using the Excel instance stored in %ExcelInstance% in all actions related to Excel (writing data, referencing the sheet, etc.).
The Problem:
- The first iteration of the loop works perfectly—data is extracted, processed, written to the Excel sheet and exported to PDF.
- However, on the second loop iteration, I get an error that says the Excel instance has been disconnected:
  
  "The object invoked has disconnected from its clients" (HRESULT 0x80010108 - RPC_E_DISCONNECTED).
- This error occurs when the "Write to Excel" action tries to use the existing Excel instance.
What I’ve Tried:
1. Ensuring the instance is referenced correctly: I’ve made sure the same %ExcelInstance% variable is used consistently throughout the loop.
2. Setting the active Excel instance: I’ve tried adding a "Set Active Excel Instance" action before the write operation in the loop to ensure the correct instance is used.
3. Adding delays: I’ve added a pause between actions to give Excel some time to complete operations before moving to the next step.
4. Not closing Excel prematurely: I made sure that Excel isn’t being closed at any point during the loop.
Questions:
1. Has anyone encountered this type of disconnection error before? What could be causing Excel to lose its connection to Power Automate Desktop during the second loop iteration?
2. Could there be an issue with Excel itself, such as a background process or dialog that’s interfering with the automation?
3. Are there best practices for managing Excel instances within loops in Power Automate Desktop that might help avoid this problem?

Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated! I’ve been stuck on this issue for a while and would love some help from the community. If you need any additional information or specifics about my setup, I’m happy to provide that as well.

Thank you so much in advance!

Best regards,

Categories:

Power Automate Desktop