Next, search for Excel and select the “Excel Online (Business)” connector. I’ll first specify that the trigger is “manual” by selecting the “Manually trigger a flow” connector. I’ll start off by creating a new “Instant Cloud Flow (Triggered manually as needed)”. Now comes the fun part of creating an automation in Power Automate to generate these documents. I also threw in a signature.jpeg file to the mix to data bind to the image control that I have specified in my example document. Once you’ve created your Excel file with some data and a Word file which contains the template of your generated document, place them on SharePoint in a folder of your choosing for Microsoft Power Automate to access them. Use the “properties” dialog for each control that you add, to specify a name for that control that you can easily recognize in your automation steps, later. You’ll also see that I’m also using an Image control in my example above. In my personal experience, as of the time of this writing (Oct 2021), I had to use the “plain text” control instead of “rich text” as only the former was supported in the Power Automate connector that I’m using in this solution. Once enabled, you’ll see a Developer tab within the ribbon and from within it, you can drag on or more dynamic content controls to add to your document. If you don’t see a Developer tab, go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon and add the “Developer” tab to your ribbon. In order to insert Dynamic Content Controls to your Word document, you’ll need the “Developer” tab enabled in Word. I also took an additional step of giving my table a friendly name that I can easily recognize in automation connectors that I wire up, later: Create Word “Template”Īs mentioned previously, we’ll be using Dynamic Content Controls in our Word document which we’ll later data-bind to. You’ll note that my sample table has three fields: First Name, Last Name and Amount. It’s important to segment the data as an actual table because the connectors that we’ll use in this solution is expecting the input data to be in a table. Create Excel File with Input DataĬreate an Excel file with an Excel Table, similar to the one shown below. For instance, instead of relying on SharePoint to store your files, you can just as easily find connectors to OneDrive or Dropbox or Google Drive and use those instead. That’s sort of the beauty of Power Platform. It will instead contain a set of Dynamic Content Controls which we’ll bind data to, dynamically, form our Excel file.ĭon’t be dismayed if your use-case or components don’t match the set I’ve selected above. It won’t be a template in the most technical sense. Word “Template” File: We’ll create a sample document using Microsoft Word.We’ll be creating documents for every row in this table. We’ll add a table in this Excel file with some sample contacts. Excel File: We’ll use an Excel file that we’ll save in SharePoint as our simple database.We’ll also use SharePoint as the storage place for the files we generate. SharePoint: We’ll use SharePoint as the repository of our input data – our mail merge data.Here are the various components of this solution: Today, I wanted to demo a more in-depth use case – generating documents dynamically. Previously, we have taken cursory looks at the Microsoft Power Platform, its components such as Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents.
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