File update issues and flow frequency

[teespolyglot]

After days of teaching myself how to use Power Automate to automate some of my more routine business processes, I created a flow which, in response to a form submission, updates a row in an excel sheet, grabs the meta data and content, and emails the sheet to the user that submitted the form.

I have encountered a troublesome problem, however, in that the sheet that gets emailed does not always contain the correct data, instead sometimes containing the data from the previous response. I've tried to counter this by adding a delay in my flow before the file is updated and then again before the file metadata and content grab, but this is not always successful in remedying the problem, and is not ideal if I want to upscale, as there may be additional responses within the time frame of the flow.

If anyone has encountered this before and can offer any advice, it would be much appreciated!!    

[Mira_Ghaly]

Hi @teespolyglot,

Can I ask if you replace the data in the sheet or you accumulate on it?

[teespolyglot]

Hi @Mira_Ghaly , thanks for your response. I'm replacing the data each time

[Mira_Ghaly · Accepted solution]

@teespolyglot 

Have you tried instead to create a new file each time and then deleting it at the end of the flow?

So the idea is you have a template and then Copy File and use the new copied file and delete it afterwards...

[Mira_Ghaly]

@teespolyglot 

Sample as below:

Column1 .. Column2 are the columns in your template, Sample as below:

[teespolyglot]

Hi @Mira_Ghaly ,

Thanks for your continued efforts on this. It's taken me all day (my column headers were 46 sentence-like questions with dynamic input responses!), but I've finally managed to overhaul the flow so that a template is copied at the beginning and deleted at the end.

At first glance it appears to be running well. I'll put it to a more intensive test tomorrow (multiple different responses in a row) to see whether I still have the same problem. Fingers crossed, it's gone!

🙂

[teespolyglot]

Hi @Mira_Ghaly ,

I've submitted a few responses to test it out this evening and all appears fine. Thanks ever so much for your help! 🙂