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Use Power Automate flow to gather prefilled URL

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Posted on by SF-09011848-0

I have a simple flow that opens an Excel file, use values in each row to open an existing MS form, prefill 2 questions in the form with the values in the row, then capture the prefilled URL of the form and save it back to the Excel file in another column of that row. I used Copilot to assist me in setting up this flow. The flow executed successfully; however, the prefilled URL result is consistently not a prefilled URL. It is instead the code snippet of the previous step. Copilot suggested various fixes that I have tried but to no avail. Has anyone done something like this successfully before? Thanks!

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Cgangweg01 893 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hello @SF-09011848-0,

Taking output from one action to use in another action (like populating a column/row in Excel) is common.

Can you share the output of the action that is obtaining the prefilled URL and the details of the action that is supposed to populate Excel?

Hide or mask private details.

With a little more detail, I'm sure you can be helped.

I assumed you were using a Power Automate cloud flow. Are you referring to Power Automate Desktop?

-Chris

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Cgangweg01 893 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi again @SF-09011848-0,

The use case and capability intrigued me because I can help business users in my company with MS Forms automations. So, I tested generating a prefilled MS Form URL from inputs (rather than gathering it as you stated, perhaps) with a Power Automate cloud flow.

Knowing the construction of a prefilled MS Form URL and using dynamic content from a manual trigger instead of Excel, in my test case, this flow generates the needed prefilled URL for my test MS Form.

Output:

If this method helps your use case, please let me know.

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SF-09011848-0 11 on at

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Thank you @Cgangweg01 for the example test! Good to see it can retrieve the prefilled URL.

Here is the flow I created for this use case. The loop goes through each row in the Excel table that has in each row: row ID, question1 answer, question2 answer, ID of the MS form to be used, the prefilled URL placeholder. This Excel file has a second table that has the same number of row, each row has: ID of the MS form, question1 key, question2 key. "Get a row" retrieves the 2 question keys for the 2 prefilled items question1 and question2 (this is used since the rows use different forms to prefill). "Compose - Base URL" puts together the base URL for the form being used for that row. "Compose - Prefilled URL" concatenates all the previously retrieved data together to form the prefilled URL.

It appears something went wrong with the retrieval of the values from the Excel file so the URLs cannot be put together. I'm going to break down the flow into individual step and test each to see where the error is.

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SF-09011848-0 11 on at

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I'm happy to report that I finally got this flow to work. The flow would get a person's name and their department values from an Excel file, prefill them for question 1 and question 2 of and existing form (the survey), then get the prefilled URL and email it to the person to complete the survey. This is repeated for x number of people/rows in this Excel file. Each person has a customized form, depending on another value in the Excel file, such that question 3 and 4 are slightly different for each person. This customization is grouped into 4 categories, so I am able to use just 4 forms in this flow for a large x number of people taking the survey.

The part that I was stuck on for the longest time was the Compose Prefilled URL, but I was able to get Copilot to give me different fixes and through trial-and-error (and writing out the output step by step) I got the right fix (the timing part of the fix was something I would not have been able to work it out on my own). The other part of the fix, using the correct property path, took a few tries from Copilot to get it right.

All in all, I'm glad it works!

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