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How to Separate and Sort Email Attachments by Type in Excel Using Power Automate?

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Posted on by Efa1609

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a flow in Power Automate where I want to process incoming emails with attachments and organize the details in an Excel file. Here’s what I’m trying to achieve:

Trigger: When an email arrives.
Check for Attachments: Determine if the email contains any attachments.
Sort Attachments: Separate attachments by their type (e.g., images like PNG, JPG; documents like PDF, Word).
Log Details in Excel: Add a new row in an Excel sheet with details like email subject, sender, and a categorized list of attachments.

This is my current flows:

I have a flow that uses multiple "Apply to Each" loops to handle email attachments. Is there a more efficient way to process and categorize these attachments, and can this be done without creating files in SharePoint?

Categories:

Building flows

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Chriddle 8,436 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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My proposal with one Apply to each that loops over the Attachment types (just to have less actions in the flow):

Apply to each (Attachment type) is an array of arrays of the types you are looking for (you probably want to add some more types)

[ [ "image/png" ], [ "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document", "application/pdf" ] ]

FilteredAttachments checks if there are Atachments with these types

From

@triggerOutputs()?['body/attachments']

Filter

@items('Apply_to_each')

contains

@item()?['contentType']

FilteredAttachmentNames gets the names of these attachments

From

@body('FilteredAttachments')

Map

@item()['name']

Compose the resulting object that you might add as a row to your Excel file

{ "Subject": @{triggerOutputs()?['body/subject']}, "Sender": @{triggerOutputs()?['body/from']}, "Image Files": @{join(body('FilteredAttachmentNames')[0], ', ')}, "Document Files": @{join(body('FilteredAttachmentNames')[1], ', ')} }

The Compose's output looks like this:

{ "Subject": "Just a test", "Sender": "Chriddle@example.com", "Image Files": "io.png", "Document Files": "Manifesto of the Communist Party.pdf, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.pdf, test.docx" }

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Efa1609 8 on at

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Hi @Chriddle its work but the output only a text. I need to be able to click on the output and open the images or documents.

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Chriddle 8,436 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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You can push this to the limit by using xpath()

join( xpath( xml(json(concat('{"Root":{"Item":',triggerOutputs()?['body/attachments'],'}}'))), concat( '//Item[', 'contentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document"', 'or contentType="application/pdf"', ']/name/text()' ) ), ', ' )

Output:

{ "Document Files": "Manifesto of the Communist Party.pdf, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.pdf, test.docx" }

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Chriddle 8,436 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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> I need to be able to click on the output and open the images or documents.

You should have told me ;)

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EI-06081227-0 8 on at

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@Chriddle Is there any other way to be able to click the link in the excel? I tried to use the xpatch() as you recommended but its only print out the same output text and not will able to be open the attachment or images.

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