Forum Discussion
Clicking on an email address in a drop down list opens up Outlook
I have a form with one of the fields being Email Address (~100 entries). When our users get to this drop down, the list is shown as a hyperlink list of email addresses. Naturally, when they click on a selection, it opens Outlook rather than selecting the choice.
The workaround right now is to click on the space after the email address. Is there a way to disable the hyperlinks so that the emails show as plain text?
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 Unicode One Dot Leader character ("․"), 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.
ccarcallas Forms automatically recognises the @ symbol and the . dot extension and creates the hyperlink automatically. The only way you can really get round this is to replace the @ and the dot with some text, for example [at] and [dot]:
Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super Usermike4465, I tried emsneds suggestion by replacing dot with one dot letter and it does not show the hyperlink and send email to the specified person email address in a start and wait for approval action. Basically, it looks like a square in Notepad++ and you could see the difference in the above image.
Yours,
I have the same issue, however that won't work for me as I'm using them in a flow to generate and email to the individual. Any other suggestions?RobElliott
mike4465 I had a similar issue, so just added a lookup to the final column, storing the emails in another sheet. Seems to be working ok.
