You’ll probably want to wait for more input, but I’ll share my perspective.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend maintaining the same data in both an Excel spreadsheet and a SharePoint list unless there’s a very specific reason. The biggest concern is redundancy and the risk of data getting out of sync. In most cases, it’s better to treat the SharePoint list as your source of truth.
If your goal is to analyze the data in Excel, I’d suggest using the Export to Excel feature from SharePoint. That way, you can refresh the data in Excel as needed without duplicating the data management effort. Clarifying why you need to keep both the spreadsheet and SharePoint list in sync will help in providing more targeted guidance.
Regarding your question about avoiding "Apply to each"—based on the flow you described and the video you linked, it’s likely required because you're working with a collection of rows from Excel, and Power Automate needs to iterate through each one to update the corresponding SharePoint item. That’s exactly what "Apply to each" is designed for.
If you're trying to improve performance, you might consider:
- Reducing the number of columns you're updating (if possible)
- Using batch updates via the SharePoint API (though that’s more advanced)
- Filtering the Excel rows before the loop to minimize unnecessary updates
Another advantage of using SharePoint as your source of truth is that it supports row-level change tracking and allows multiple users to edit the list simultaneously without file locking issues. It also helps prevent accidental overwrites, since users can’t easily modify the entire dataset like they could in a spreadsheet. Plus, SharePoint lists are generally harder to delete or accidentally remove than Excel files, which adds an extra layer of protection for important data.
