Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello all,

First message here and somehow a newbie to power automate, thanks for your help in the following case:

I have two excel files, each with an "ID" column.

If excel file B does not contain an ID that is present in excel file A, I would like to highlight the ID in this excel file A in red colour and receive an email notification with this(these) ID(s) in the body of the email.

Please note that file A can repeat IDs in the same column.

I can't get this flow to work as it results in this error:

"The execution of template action 'Apply_to_each_2' failed: the result of the evaluation of 'foreach' expression '@items('Apply_to_each_3')?['ID']' is of type 'String'. The result must be a valid array."

Any ideas?

Regards,

Categories:

Building flows

Hi @Helenag ,

Some comments:

If the data in both files is organized as tables, you can perform the comparison task with Power Automate actions without any issues
However, Power Automate cannot directly change the formatting of an Excel range (highlight it in red). To achieve it you can either:
- Use an Office Script, which is similar to a VBA, but compatible with Power Automate. It is TypeScript based, so it may require a basic knowledge about programming (check some articles about it at the end of this post)
- Create an additional column in your Excel file just to control the ID presence from 'file B'. You can use only true/false or yes/no in this column, and then set a conditional formatting rule to highlight the cell if it is marked as 'false' or 'no'. Particularly, I believe that this option may be easier to implement for your use case.
About your error, you are apparently trying to loop the 'ID' value from one of your records. I know that these Power Automate loops can be tricky sometimes, so could you please share an image of your flow design to we investigate how does it look and where the error is?