Loop through Excel rows to create Planner tasks?

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Posted on by Dimani

Hello

I am starting to learn Power Apps automate the creation of Planner tasks from records in an Excel file.

I found that Power Apps does not have the traditional loop structure that we can use to process each record.

There is ForAll loop, but the result is another table.

Also found different places mentioning using a timer.

Would like to double check that we cannot or can do what we are hoping to do by creating tasks from an Excel file.

We found an example to achieve the above by using Power Automate. However, we do not have the Excel connector. Therefore we

switched to looking into Power Apps instead.

Thank you

Dimani

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v-jefferni Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Dimani ,

As you said, the ForAll loop will create a new table as described in the doc, but it could do the same thing as the "traditional" loop as well. Working with Excel, the limitation is the performance and the delegation issue may caused on the amount of the rows in the table. In other words, if you have a large excel table and would like to do the loop on each row to create the planner tasks, there would be problems, Power Automate will be the better choice. If you have O365 license suites, you could store the worksheet in OneDrive for business or SharePoint library to use the Excel(Online) connector.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni
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Dimani 15 on at

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Jeffer,

Thanks for your information.

Good to know that the ForAll loop can actually do the traditional looping function. Last week, when I tried it and call the CreateTasks function, it gave me errors. Therefore, I thought I could not use it as a traditional loop.

We have at most 50 tasks in a Planner. Based on your information, I would think it would not create a performance concern.

Two things, however, when I programmatically created a task by calling the CreateTask function, for some reason, the start date and due date were wrong. The dates in the Excel are simply, say, 2/28/2022. And the tasks were never saved to the To do bucket. They always ended up in a no bucket list.

As to using Power Automate, we found an example from the Internet. And that was our first choice, since we do not know Power Apps or Power Automate. However, our M365 is in GCCH, so we do not have the Excel (online) connector, and therefore I am looking into using Power Apps instead.

You mention One Drive for Business, and that we have. I did not know we could use One Drive for Business connector in place of the Excel connector. Let me go back to Power Automate to take a look. When it works out in Power Automate, it should be no or very low code. That would be idea because anyone can maintain it.

Thank you

Dimani

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v-jefferni Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Dimani ,

As shown in the reference doc about Excel connectors, neither Excel (Business) nor Excel (OneDrive) are supported within Power Automate and Power Apps in the GCCH region:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/excelonlinebusiness/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/excelonline/

As the workaround, I would say to use SharePoint list or Dataverse to store the tasks would be much easier.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it.

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