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Multi person/group field columns in the same excel file

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Posted on by DGPowerAutomate

Hi everyone,

I need to import an excel file which can have 500 rows. 14 columns in total but 7 columns of this file are multi-person/group.

- Each multi person/group column can contain: [null, 1 email address until 3 email addresses]. [format: email;email;email]

- All columns have different email addresses so potentially 21 different user emails per row.
- I also have to test if the email exists in the organization.

How to build a flow able to create an item if doesn't exist or update a item if it already exists in the sharepoint List?

Everything I tested was very long and fails each time (timeout, management of null person field, etc ...

I'm just lost

Thanks for your help

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Building flows

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WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Where are you trying to import into? SharePoint? Dataverse? Something else?

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DGPowerAutomate on at

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hello WillPage
oh! sorry yes to a sharepoint list

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DGPowerAutomate on at

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Hello guys, hope somesone can help me,
I finally build a solution but I have some strange results when I create / update the record in Sharepoint list
So, let me explain,
- I created an array variable for each multi-person column so 7 variables at the end.
- I loop on each excel rows and make tests for each columns
- if the value in excel is empty, I 'Set my array variable with [0]' which provide possibility to empty a multi-person field.
If not empty, I check if the user exists in the organization with 'Search User V2" and in function of the result, collect the bad email in an append string (will use at the end to send a message with the full list of bad emails). If the user exists, I send a HTTP request to get his ID and append this result in the variable. I loop until the end of the excel email (emails provided like that: email1;email2; email3 from Excel for example).
- After that I just have to create or update the item in Sharepoint List.

The problem is, when I'm processing the record one for example 'ShippingContact' is empty in excel. If you follow the result process, all seems good. Process seems well applied but when we check the last compose we see that lot of IDs are added and I don't know where they come from!
Any explanation about where I'm wrong?

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DGPowerAutomate on at

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Hello all,
I found, afters days why my flow doesn't work. I activated the parallelism to have multiple threads running at the same time. I didn't know that variables were 'forbidden' in a loop 'Apply to each' with the parallelism activated.
So, without the parallelism my script takes 5 minutes for 20 rows. with parallelism less than 1 minute ...

I will replace all variable by compose and see what happen ...

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DGPowerAutomate on at

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Impossible to replace variables because Compose outside of an apply to each is not available 😞
So, do you know another solution?

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WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Compose outside of an apply to each loop is available, you just need to type it into the expression editor, e.g outputs('Compose')

It will output an array with each item being the contents of the compose for each iteration of the loop.

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