Answered

Retrieve data table column into list actions from Excel sheet - How to select specific sheet?

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hi all, I'm opening an Excel file with a tab/sheet with a set of URLs. I'm trying to read the values from that column and feed it into For Each Loop. Retrieve data table column into list action is erroring out with this error "Parameter 'Data table': Argument 'DataTable' must be 'Datatable'." as I am not sure how to put the sheet name into a variable in previous steps. I tried Set active Excel worksheet but it doesn't have any output variable. Maybe I'm missing the basic concept of PAD...

Thank you for your help!!

Categories:

Power Automate Desktop

All responses (9)

Answers (1)

Sort by

Verified answer

burque505 398 on at

Like
a
(1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!
Hi @Anonymous, maybe this will be of some use to you.
In this flow:
Open Excel worksheet
Select range of cells
Copy the selected cells (i.e. put them on the clipboard)
Get that clipboard text with the cells' contents into a variable
[debug] Display clipboard text
Split text variable into a list
Display TextList[0] (i.e. first selected row).
Flow:
Records on clipboard (and saved to variable)
Setting up the splitting of the clipboard text (now in a variable) to a list

And display TextList[0]
From there you should be able to get to the URLs with your loop.
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

@burque505 Thank you again so much. Trying out now. Thanks!!!!
burque505 398 on at

Like
a
(1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Good luck, @Anonymous.
I am hoping that as PAD matures we'll see more Excel actions (and more actions related of Office in general, Word in particular). I am also hoping for more actions related to datables.
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Nothing pops up as a message...hhhmmm
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

so there is no way to specify tab or worksheet??
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

This seems to be describing what I'm trying to do but still not familiar with PAD concept...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/variable-data-types
burque505 398 on at

Like
a
(1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

@Anonymous wrote:
so there is no way to specify tab or worksheet??
You mean to get the worksheet data into a datatable, right? See below. That's probably both easier and more in line with what you want to do than what I proposed earlier.
Here I just read one column into the datatable, the column containing the URLs. Therefore the column index for the message display is 'ColumnAsList[0]'. I imagine reading the whole sheet into a datatable will be very common, though.
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

Like
a
(1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

OK, sort of getting the concept.
burque505 398 on at

Like
a
(0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

👍👍