Forum Discussion
Clicking on an email address in a drop down list opens up Outlook
ccarcallas I'm having the same issue and am trying to achieve the same result: select an email and use it in a Power Automate Flow to send an email. There is a workaround, but it takes a couple extra steps. If you replace the period in the email in the domain name (@company.com) with a https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2024 ("․"), MS Forms will not recognize this as linkable text because it is not an actual period.
From there, you can use a function in Power Automate to replace the unicode character in the selected email address with a regular period prior to inserting the email address. You could do this with a Compose action ahead of time to keep things easy to read, or add the function directly into the email field. I have screenshot the compose action below, as this is my preference. You would then use the output of the compose as your email address in the Send Email step.
You can use this formula to replace the unicode stand-in: replace(outputs(ADD DYNAMIC CONTENT HERE),'․','.')
Because the character swap may not be obvious to others, I added a note on my compose step in case anyone else ever needs to understand this action.
Hope this helps!
I did come up with a work around, however I'm not sure if this will work for you unless your emails are similar. Our company emails are formatted as such: (firstname.lastname @ company.com) . In the dropdown the options are displayed as firstname.lastname which will become the dynamic content in the flow, (i.e., email). In the To: part of the email I inserted the email dynamic content and right after entered the text @company.com. emsneds
mike4465 I actually started with that workaround in mind, but it didn’t make sense with the way our form was written, and I didn’t think our stakeholders would go for it. (If I didn’t have the email address in the dropdown, the next option was supposed to be the person’s name, which would create more work to implement in Power Automate than my proposed workaround). My colleagues don’t fully understand the capabilities of Power Automate or even MS Forms, so I wanted to find a workaround that would display the full email address without linking it.
I know they take up more space on the form, but instead of a dropdown, could you use 'options' to make the selection?
mike4465 Theoretically, yes, but in my case we have something like 13 options, so it’s not ideal. They are also still linked based on your screenshot, which is preferable to avoid. We don’t trust that our users will 100% of the time click on the radio button instead of the text, and opening the link would almost certainly cause complaints about the form.
I did, however, find the workaround using the Unicode character in place of the period in the domain name. It works without issue since I’ve set it up and I am happy with it.