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Sharepoint files in Desktop App

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Posted on by MartyMorgan

Brand new to Power Automate.

Trying to automate a series of interactions between Excel & PowerPoint for my team which require the Desktop versions for both apps.

But I can't get past step one of generating the file instance variable, because the files exist on SharePoint. When I start the "Launch Excel/PP" action and try to open the file, it can only browse locally. Then when I try pasting an url/path to the SharePoint file, every variation I've tested has been rejected.

Is there a secret syntax to the SharePoint file download url within PAD?

Or is there another way to generate a variable around an already launched app instance (it would be very easy to start our process with opening the necessary files THEN running the Flow)?

Any pointers would be very appreciated 🙂

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Building flows

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ChristianAbata 8,953 Most Valuable Professional on at

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hi @MartyMorgan could you share an screanshot from the PAD action that you are using?

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MartyMorgan 10 on at

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Here are two screenshots below.
The link you see I've tried here is from SharePoint's Share function: /People with existing access/copied link. But other times I've also copied the url directly when the file is open in the Excel WebApp, and I've tried some YouTube url truncation trick. Nothing has defeated the syntax error for me yet.

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Mark-Shenouda Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @MartyMorgan
As you mentioned PAD will only browse the files on the machine.
You can try to Open the browser and user the URL , but I see that you need to use the Desktop version of the Apps.
For that you can try to Sync the Document Library on the machine and use the the file path on onedrive sync folder
When the PAD applies the changes , they will be synced to the SharePoint file
I hope this resolves the issue.
Best Regards

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MartyMorgan 10 on at

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Thanks for this suggestion. I should have noted that I was aware of this solution option, which does work for team members in my organization. But about a third of the team are consultants who have SharePoint access, but not sync'd local files.
I was looking for an option that I could provide as a solution to the whole team. If sync'd local files is the official strategy to access SharePoint files from PAD then I understand.

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ChristianAbata 8,953 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@MartyMorgan what you can try is adding your files into a Blob Storage Azure service them make it public acces and read the file by using APIS call.

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sebastiendb 69 on at

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Please vote to solve this issue:
open a sharepoint file from power automate desktop - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

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AronBrown 45 on at

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when you put links in you have to add a % for every % there is. so should show Shared%%200 instead of Shared%200....

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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This worked for me!! Thank you so much 🙂

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