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Having trouble to match Name input from a Microsoft forms with company emails

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Posted on by JoãoMoreira96

Hello everyone,

Power automate newbie here. I'm in the process of setting up a Power Automate workflow to make requesting protective gear through a Microsoft Form a breeze. Our goal is to automatically log all the important details in a dedicated SharePoint List and notify our colleagues when their gear is ready for pickup.

Here's the issue: The form asks for coworkers' first and last names in a single field called "Name." However, I'm running into a bit of a snag when it comes to getting this info matched up with email addresses. Even if an email isn't found, I want to make sure we still capture the info in SharePoint.

(Note: The "Search term" is empty because i think this may be the source of the problem idk)

I've been experimenting with the "Compose" actions to break down the names, and even trying to create a condition where the Sharepoint entries should be created given if the "Given Name" and "Surname" match the respective splitted name strings, but I've hit a roadblock. In earlier trials, the workflow only recognized the email when i inserted my full name, as seen on my companys' office 365 user list.

Also, in both cases mentioned above, the workflow doesnt create a SharePoint entry like I expected, for neither scenarios where an email adress is found or not.

If anyone has experience with Power Automate and SharePoint integration, I could really use some guidance here. How can I make sure names match with email addresses, and how can I ensure that the workflow consistently creates SharePoint entries regardless of email recognition?

Thank you in advance.

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Paulie78 8,422 Moderator on at

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If the users completing the form work for your organisation, then simply make it an organisational form:

Then there will be no need for them to enter their name or email address and that information will come through automatically in the form response.

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JoãoMoreira96 6 on at

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Hello,
the problem with that is that most workers from the company i work at dont have the microsoft account logged in; we also have temporary workers here that are not given a microsoft account, so this workflow is a means to respond to appease to those conditions.

Having the forms accessible to all people within the facility is the best scenario to appease everybody

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rzaneti 4,241 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @JoãoMoreira96 ,

You can keep your current approach, but you should know that this is not the most efficient way to execute this task. If you use the 'Search for users' action without any search term, it will return empty. If you need a list with all users from your company, use the 'List group members' action and select ' All Company' (highlighted in green below):

The name fields returned by the 'List group members' action are the same from the 'Search for users', so you can keep your logic in the Condition (the only issue here is that you will be accessing each element from the 'group members' to run this condition test, which is not the most efficient way to do it).

Recommended alternative
If you prefer to take an a little more efficient approach, we can work with the 'Search for users'.

Insert both given name and surname as search terms. If you have an account with the user name, it will be returned to you; otherwise, you will receive an empty array. In your condition, instead of checking the given name and surname, check the length of 'Search for users' output: if it is equal to zero (which means that no user was found with the provided name), insert your record in SP List without email; if its length is equal to 1, insert the record with email.

I see that you already have some expressions in your flow, so use the 'length' expression may not be difficult for you. However, if you have any trouble when using dynamic contents or expressions, you can refer to this article that I recently wrote about it: http://digitalmill.net/2023/07/31/using-dynamic-content-in-power-automate/

Let me know if these comments make sense for you and which approach fits better to your use case, so we can move forward with any of them. Also, let me know if you need additional clarification or any other help 🙂

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JoãoMoreira96 6 on at

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Hi, thanks you for the response. I think that your recommended process seems as the best alternative.

My issue with this workflow is that, for example, in my case, the workflow cant recognize my email when i only insert my first and last name in the "Name" field, however, if i type my full name (consists of 4 total names), it will automatically get my company email. My objective is
I've changed the condition to the length expression, just like you said, however, the Sharepoint Entry still did not generate, do you perhaps know why this is happening?

Some days ago i created another version of this workflow, where i used a more complex form and it was running properly, but i had to cut it because it generated a whole lot of problems internally. Thats why i dont understand why this flow is not creating any entry, even though it should create one even though no email is found.

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rzaneti 4,241 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @JoãoMoreira96 ,

It is possible that the name provided in the form response has something different from the data stored in your Microsoft Account. It is not your fault: different Power Platform connectors deliver data in different ways and it may requires a text transformation before we use it.

So, could you please share the raw outputs from the 'Nome' answer in your 'Get response details' action? You can follow the steps below to find the raw outputs:

First, go to the 'flow details' page and click in one of the previous runs:

Once you do it, you will be in the 'flow run page', which may look like this:

Go to the 'Get response details' action and click in it to expand the details. Then click in "Show raw outputs" in the OUTPUT section. In some cases, this button appears as 'Click to download':

It will display a sidebar on the right side of your screen containing this JSON notation (if you had the 'click to download' option, it will open the outputs in a new tab):

Find the "body" property. It is always after the "headers" property. Inside the 'body' property, you will see some other properties with a weird name, and each one will match to an answer to each of your form's questions. Identify which one is related to 'Nome:' and share it (you can hide the actual value if it is sensitive; we just need to check how the Form is displaying it).

Make sure to remove any sensitive content from the image before sharing. You also can find more details about how to access the outputs in Power Automate in this article that I wrote recently: http://digitalmill.net/2023/06/29/how-to-access-the-raw-outputs-in-power-automate/

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