Excel Now() function doesn't update when pulling from sheet

[Imrans23]

Hey all, 

I am having a small issue where I am trying to pull a dynamic value from an excel file (cell formula is "=NOW()" formatted as time) and send it to myself as a teams message. However, whenever I pull it, it shows me the data as it was last loaded and not the current time.

For instance, in the below screenshot, it shows 3:20:54. If I were to close excel as is and then run the flow below after 10 minutes, it will still return 3:20:54. Was wondering if I am missing a step that can address this issue? 

I particularly need the current time to be generated within excel because in my actual workflow, I have queries within cells and those queries concatenate the actual query text with the current time so I can run the query with respect to current time.

[grantjenkins · Accepted solution]

Why are you trying to get the current time from Excel? If you wanted the current time, then you can get this directly from within your Power Automate.

The way I'd do it is use Convert time zone so you can easily convert the UTC time into your time zone and format the output so it's the same as what you have in your Excel.

The expression to get the current Date/Time is:

utcNow()

And the format to get hour:minute;second AM/PM (similar to your Excel format) is:

h:mm:ss tt

You can then get the other data from Excel and concatenate it with your time. Or am I missing something specific to your issue?

[Imrans23]

Lol, since I had already concatenated in excel, I was fixated on that. Pretty simple fix. Thanks.