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Jamie Milliken's avatar
Jamie Milliken
Copper Contributor
Feb 27, 2020
Solved

Populating document library column value from on of the uploaded Excel file's cells (Possible?)

I've been trying to 'automate' a property column in a document library by having its value populated by each document added.   To try to explain a little clearer:   User adds document to the libr...
Document Library
excel
SharePoint Online
  • ChrisWebbTech's avatar
    ChrisWebbTech
    Feb 28, 2020
    Yeah just add a column: ROWID and for the row value in that column a 1 on your file exports. Then, you can just plug in ROWID for key column, and 1 for the key row. Then you will always get the value in the first row. Then for your value in the SharePoint action, you should have the BaselineTotal in the pick list from the "Get Row" section, you should see all your excel columns in there.

    This basically would set your SharePoint column you put it in, to the first row of the document with the BaselineTotal value.
ChrisWebbTech's avatar
ChrisWebbTech
MVP
Feb 28, 2020
Power automate all the way. If I can remember to come back to this tomorrow when I get in and to a PC I can share a rough idea how to do it. I know you must use tables usually to reference data in the flow but that’s for a row. Not sure if there was a trigger for an exact cell I’ll have to look it over but this should be possible in Power Automate.
  • Jamie Milliken's avatar
    Jamie Milliken
    Copper Contributor
    Feb 28, 2020

    ChrisWebbTech Thanks a million! I appreciate your response. I've looked at Power Automate, as I mentioned, but I only noticed being able to reference to 'rows' - although I'm sure there's a way. I intend to educate myself further with PA given its usefulness, but with the pressure/timeline on this one, I'm left to 'reach out'.

     

    ** Sidenote: As I was doing a little more digging this morn, I came across an extensive BI blog that seems to belong to you - ironic, lol. You can add another 'follower' 🙂

     

    Again, thank you!

    • Jamie Milliken's avatar
      Jamie Milliken
      Copper Contributor
      Feb 28, 2020

      I've been messing around with Flow/PA a little, but my roadblocks tend to be:

       

      a) How to get the value of a single cell from the document.

      b) Flow seems to want a specific workbook/file in the steps, where I am wanting to reference the 'current file' (the one that is modified/added.)

       

      I figured I'd draw a simple picture of what I'm trying to get out of it:

       

      Of course, the trigger can even be scheduled to 'ripple through' each doc and set the property - Ideally it would be on add/modify though...

      • ChrisWebbTech's avatar
        ChrisWebbTech
        MVP
        Feb 28, 2020
        So I'm finally getting around to this, I need to know a bit more about the excel sheet, basically in order to work with flow it has to be inside a table, and we have to somehow have a value on the row to retrieve the data in the row. Trying to find out if you can just put in a generic excel row number somehow but not finding anything.

        The table thing can be tricky so that might kill it first off. Do you know if a table is used for the data in the excel file?

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