How to use Power Automate to compare excel and look for difference

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Posted on by concjames

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Hi everyone,

I am creating a flow to export the same style of excel files every day and to look for differences.

For example, if Record State changed from "Open" to "In Process", I wanna to know the Record ID. Also, new record might come in, such as record ID 123456.

Do you know how to do the comparison of excel files in Power Automate? Thank you for your advice.

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manuelstgomes 6,625 on at

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HI @concjames,

As far as I know, and I hope someone here has an excellent workaround, it's not easy to do this. The only thing that comes to mind is to fetch the previous version and compare if something changed. Of course, it's possible to get the prior version of the file like this, but then the comparison is tricky.

I understand that this is not a complete solution, but it can point you in the right direction or trigger some excellent discussion where we can both learn.

Cheers
Manuel

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hi @concjames

Just wanting to understand a bit more.

Are you saying about
i. comparison of the same file between its previous version and the latest version?
In this case you might have to get the previous versions as suggested by @manuelstgomes . Also think of PA automatically saving a previous copy in some temporary folder at a frequent interval to make the comparison easy.
OR
ii. comparison of two different files File1 and File2 which has the same format everyday?
In this case you can read the excel data of each file using PA and then do string comparisons.

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concjames 115 on at

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Thanks for the feedback. Do you think we can use PowerBI to do the comparison instead? But using Power Automate to do dataset refresh.

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