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Power Automate too slow in adding rows into a table?

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Posted on by CU21050857-2

Hello,

I am building a flow that starts with a MS Forms response and pulls info from a spreadsheet attached on the form response and puts it in another spreadsheet. Then pulls the info from the second spreadsheet to send an email with a HTML table embedded which contains the info. The flow has a condition which decides between to parallel processes, but both of them do what I described earlier.

The condition on the left works fine. It correctly get the table from the attached spreadsheet, list rows, and add them onto the other spreadsheet. Then it lists the rows that just had been added on the second spreadsheet to use them in a HTML table.

However, for some reason, despite being a copy from the other condition, the flow on the left fails to list the rows that just had been added. The HTML table in the email shows empty, only with column titles but no data. I have resubmitted the same run and of course it duplicates the rows added on the spreadsheet, but the email table shows just one copy of the rows. This means it works fine, and that the problem is that the spreadsheet is too slow and by the time it actions the 'list rows present in a table', the table hasn't been updated yet from the previous action.

It doesn't really makes much sense to me because the other condition has the same order of actions and it works okay, the spreadsheet is already updated by the time the flow actions the last 'list rows present in a table'. I have tried adding a delay step of 20 seconds, to give time to the spreadsheet to get updated before the rows are listed, but the outcome is still the same: flow on the left works fine, flow on the right can't find the rows (and if rerun it only finds one copy of the rows).

Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve it? Are there any tricks to get Power Automate to have enough time in between actions?

I've added a screenshoot of the beginning of the conditions in case anyone wonders. They only differ at the beginning. The one on the left gets a user profile using a spreadsheet table and puts a document in a array (to be used as attachment on the email), while the second adds two documents to this array (one of them being variable - that's why the scope). Everything else works fine, it's just the problem I mentioned before.

Thanks,

Guillermo

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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You may want to rewrite your post as I am not making any sense of your problem, and others may not as well since you don't have any replies yet.

I will not go into too much depth, but why do you take the spreadsheet attached in a MS Forms response and put it in another spreadsheet? And what info is pulled from a second spreadsheet, and is the second spreadsheet the one where you take the data from the spreadsheet attached and add it to another spreadsheet? Then you say your flow decides what to do between two parallel processes that you described earlier. Where did you describe this? You also say the condition on the left works fine. Looking at the image attached, I see no conditions within the left side of the image. In fact, I don't see one condition anywhere in the image.

Also, are your parallel actions both working on the same spreadsheet? If so, that is most likely the cause of your problem. Instead of doing them in parallel, do them sequentially in the order they need to happen. Otherwise, please clearly articulate what is happening under each path of the parallel actions.

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CU21050857-2 7 on at

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@David_MA, sorry that I didn't make it clear. The flow works with a switch action that includes 5 different conditions. 3 of them only include a simple action: send an email. They work fine. The other 2 are the ones shown in the images I attached, where each of the columns of actions are the actions below these two conditions.

It is a switch condition, so only one of the parallel flows will run. This is working fine too.

The flow in each of these 2 conditions, basically and generally speaking, does the following:

Step 1. Reads a table from a spreadsheet that is submitted in the MS Forms response (spreadsheet1). It uses the action 'List rows present in a table'

Step 2. Copies the info from this table into another table of a different spreadsheet (spreadsheet2). This second spreadsheet contains info from all the different submissions. It uses the action 'Add a row' and 'for each' to do this.

Step 3. Reads the table from spreadsheet2 to copy the info into a HTML table which will be embedded in a 'Send an email' action. It uses the action 'List rows present in a table'.

All the info transferred between spreadsheets is text, numbers and dates. The reason for spreadsheet2 is to keep all the info from each of the spreadsheets1 (submitted on different MS Forms responses) together in the same place.

Both switch conditions run successfully when tested. However, one of them shows the HTML table in the email with the correct info, whereas the other shows an empty table. The problem with the one showing an empty table is that by the time the flow triggers Step3, spreadsheet2 is not updated yet with the info to be added in Step2 and therefore it doesn't find this info and delivers an empty table. It doesn´t make sense to me since both flows are exact copies. I tried adding a 20 second delay and didn't work, however, I have recently extended the delay to 1 min and it seems to work.

It could be just that the spreadsheet2 needs time to be updated with the new rows before trying to read those specific rows. Has anyone experienced this before?

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David_MA 12,982 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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I think I am starting to make sense of things. Add a delay after "step 2" of 10 minutes as a starting point. The issue is most likely that the data is still being written to the spreadsheet even though the flow has moved on to the next action. This is resulting in the table in your e-mail being empty.

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