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Excel file manipulation

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Posted on by DM-17060836-0

Hello,

I have a flow that monitors for a certain email, when the email comes through, the flow then copies an excel file and creates a table in a fixed range, ready for the next flows to take over and use said data.

The excel sheet is an output of a ms access database where numbers are entered hourly, once the numbers have been inputted at the press of a button the access database creates a PDF, send the PDF in an email, and creates an excel file. The excel file completely overwrites the previous version.

The trouble I'm having is, my flow is creating a table, and then the next time the flow runs it fails because 'there's already a table'.

I don't know how true that statement is, when I open the excel workbook, and press ctrl+A, it highlights that there is a table, I can't figure out how to get this flow to work repeatedly, because when the workbook is overwritten, there is no table present in the workbook that power automate can use. It may be because I'm force testing and so the excel workbook isn't being updated, but I'm not sure, any help regarding this would be greatly appreciated.

If any more info is needed please let me know.

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David_MA 14,556 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Please share screen shots of your two flows and their configuration so we can see what you're doing. For your second flow, you could use the Get tables action, then check if tables were found in the file, and finally you can use the List rows present in a table. Without seeing your flow, I am not sure exactly what you are doing based on your description, but this will at least determine if there truly are any tables in the spreadsheet.

The Get tables will return an array, so assuming you only have one table in the spreadsheet, you would use this expression to populate the table name field: first(outputs('Get_tables')?['body/value'])?['name']

If you have more than one table in the spreadsheet, this will be more complicated.

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DM-17060836-0 27 on at

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Create Table PA flow is part one, HTTP is part 2.

If any, there should only ever be 1 table in the workbook. can't understand why there is though, because when the numbers are updated, the old excel file gets overwritten with a new file, meaning it should be a whole new group of data. I have tried to only use the second flow, to see if creating the table once was enough, but it wasn't, after the flow running a few times it starts to fail because there is no table present.

Thank you for your help, once you have confirmed if your previous suggestion is viable with my current flow, I will implement and record results.

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David_MA 14,556 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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In your last post, the screen shots do not show how anything is configured. WIthout seeing how you have cofigured the actions, if you are not getting any error messages there isn't much I can advise you on. You may want to refer to this YouTube tutorial for creating and populating an Excel spreadsheet via Power Automate. I use this method and have not had any issues with the process.

Here is the link to the video tutorial: https://youtu.be/RB_ySjhm9Sg?si=QSpT7WacX0-bu-yU

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