Populating Excel spreadsheet from a complex/branching form

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Posted on by dalloways1

Hello All,

I am building a form where instructors can request the booking of activities for their course(s).

The form will have quite a lot of branching, as (a) there can be multiple activities in the same course, and (b) an instructor may teach multiple courses.

It will look more or less like this:

- Name

- Course

- Details of activity (multiple questions)

- Do you want to request more activities within the same course? Y/N (branching, if yes, repeated details questions)

- Do you want to request activities in another course? Y/N (branching, if yes, repeated questions starting from "course")

Instructors can request up to 10 activities in up to 5 courses.

Now, I would like this data to be collected in an Excel spreadsheet via Power Automate. I have created something similar before using conditions (i.e., if the answer to a branching question is Yes, add a row here), to avoid blank rows to appear; but I'm afraid the number of scenarios in this form would make the flow a structural nightmare.

There must be more efficient ways to do this -- so if you have any ideas, please help!

Thank you very much in advance.

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Using flows

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wskinnermctc 6,519 Moderator on at

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Don't plan to build it to an Excel spreadsheet. Plan to build it to go into a SharePoint list. You will have much more functionality and flexibility.

You could even build it to go into the SharePoint list which might be ugly with a lot of columns, but then another flow gets that new SharePoint item (form response) and cleans it to be put into an Excel table or even a cleaner SharePoint list.

I think you could spend a lot of time trying to get Power Automate to do backflips to put variable branching form responses into an Excel file correctly. When the time could be better used for getting responses into a SharePoint list and dealing with them from there.

Finally, I know this is a big leap, but think about a Power App. If you made a SharePoint list that was like your perfect output. Think of choice columns or if you could make everyone fill their item directly into the SharePoint list. It is not extremely difficult to make a Canvas Power App using a SharePoint list. The options from the SharePoint columns can easily populate choice dropdowns in a Power App.

Not a solution, but if you are planning to make something that will be used for many people, plan on scalability, and for sure do not use Excel as the database.

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dalloways1 3 on at

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Thank you! Yes, I came to the same conclusion. I will try and build an app, and if I get it to work, I'll use the base for other similar processes, too. If you could point me to resources for beginners, I'd appreciate it!

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wskinnermctc 6,519 Moderator on at

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Good Luck!

Here is the microsoft page for canvas app and SharePoint list:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/canvas-apps/app-from-sharepoint?tabs=home-new-look

This guy Shane Young has good power app videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA5xUtrM6bo&list=PLCGGtLsUjhm2bonhBZuEhZU72QkFjOpc6https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnYe_7fpZRM

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