cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Ranjini

Save email attachments to a specific folder using Power Automate Desktop

Save email attachments to a specific folder using Power Automate Desktop.

 

Power Automate Desktop

Power Automate is an application within the Microsoft Office 365 Suite designed to automate manual workflows by literally connecting our apps and common tasks together.

Power Automate is a cloud-based solution that helps users to automate activities and operations to save ample time and effort on tedious manual tasks. You can use the platform to automate workflows between your applications and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data and much more.

 

Introduction

This applies to regular emails with attachments that you would like Power Automate to automatically save the attachment(s) to a specific folder. The dynamically chosen path is based on the Subject Line of the email received. This can be achieved relatively easy and would save you a lot of routine administration time.

I get plenty of emails with attachments to them. I want them to save automatically to my folder instead of clicking on them, save to, or drag and drop them onto my desktop in order to print them, or anything like that. I want them just to – as soon as I get an email, I want it just to feed into my folder.

To build this workflow you need

  • Power Automate Desktop.
  • Folder to save the attachment:

I had created two folders in E drive ‘hardware invoice’ and ‘software invoice’ in order to save attachments.

Ranjini_0-1649243898222.png

 

  • An email Account (Outlook):

Here I have four unread emails all with attachments present in them. I am saving these attachments based on the subject of the email received.

 

Ranjini_1-1649243898229.png

 

In our four emails received two are related to hardware, one is related to software and the last one is something related to mobile. Our aim is to save the hardware-related attachment in the 'hardware invoice’ folder and the software-related attachment in the ‘invoice’ folder.

We are going to achieve this by directing our flow as if the email subject contains the word hardware the attachment present will be saved in the directed folder and the same for software. And the email neither has hardware nor software should remain unread.

Our flow

Our first step is to launch outlook and the instance created will be stored in a variable.

Ranjini_2-1649243898241.png

 

The entire success of our flow lies in the next step. ‘Retrieve email messages from outlook’.

Ranjini_3-1649243898248.png

 

In this step we are giving the name of the account to work with, the name of the folder to retrieve messages from (inbox, send items), next we are specifying whether to retrieve all messages in the folder or only the unread ones or from reading mails.

If you want to be quite specific about the sender or the recipient of the email you can specify it next to ‘from contains and to contains’ respectively. Here our aim is to filter the emails with respect to the subject, so specify the key phrase to find within the email subject in ‘subject contains’. Here we filter the email subject using the word ‘hardware’. The last two steps help to save the attachment in the desired folder.

 

 

Same processes are repeated to save email attachments which contain software in its subject line.

Ranjini_4-1649243898256.png

 

 

Finally close the outlook.

Let us run the flow and check the Output

Below given images are showing that our attachments are saved in the folder specified.

 

Ranjini_5-1649243898260.png

 

Ranjini_6-1649243898262.png

 

Conclusion

We had successfully executed our flow using POWER AUTOMATE DESKTOP. From this BOT now that you know how to save attachments present in our mail concerning the subject line, from address, to address and key phrase present in the body of our email.

I hope you found this blog helpful. Please provide feedback in the comment section.

 

Comments
Anonymous

Can you go further and sort out the specific email to a folder in Outlook?

Would it possible to detect the invoice date (in this case of saving invoices automatically) and store it in accordingly to a fiscal period ?

thnks!

Bruno

My outlook connector doesn't have a Retrieve email option. I have get emailV2 and get emailsV3. Neither of these has the "Save attachments" or "Save attachments into" line items in them. 

Any idea what I could be missing?

Hello, all. Couple of questions:

1.- Can we then move the email into an Outlook folder?

2.- Can we connect to a group mailbox? Our org has group mailboxes and we receive attachments in them.

awesome

can we just save the excel attachments

For anonymous user on this thread:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW5iUV2rRGQ

 

^this video describes the process

it seems like you'd have to set up different processes per vendor

Thank you for your sharing.

Could you please support to instruct me below issue:

I received daily report with attachment in xl file, I just want to save attachment just end of month, not daily, how can i do it? 

Thank you for your reading.

@minhtien 

 

Minhtien,

 

Just to clarify... you receive an attachment each day, but want to save ALL of the daily attachments for the month, at one time, at the end of the month?

@daquilje

 

Thank you for your reply.

Let me clairfy it

For example :

Jan:

 + Day 1-> receive attachemnt 1

 + Day 2 --> receive attachemnt 2

  ......

 + Day 31 -> receive attachment 31

Feb:

 + Day 1-> receive attachemnt 1

 + Day 2 --> receive attachemnt 2

  ......

 + Day 28 -> receive attachment 28

.......

I just want to save attachment 31 in Jan, and attachment 28 in Feb and so on..... ignore other attachemnts

Thank you.

Could you please support me on this?

About the Author
  • Experienced Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Skilled in Office 365, Azure, SharePoint Online, PowerShell, Nintex, K2, SharePoint Designer workflow automation, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, PowerShell, Active Directory, Operating Systems, Networking, and JavaScript. Strong consulting professional with a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) focused in Information Technology from Mumbai University.
  • I am a Microsoft Business Applications MVP and a Senior Manager at EY. I am a technology enthusiast and problem solver. I work/speak/blog/Vlog on Microsoft technology, including Office 365, Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, and Teams Etc. I am helping global clients on Power Platform adoption and empowering them with Power Platform possibilities, capabilities, and easiness. I am a leader of the Houston Power Platform User Group and Power Automate community superuser. I love traveling , exploring new places, and meeting people from different cultures.
  • Read more about me and my achievements at: https://ganeshsanapblogs.wordpress.com/about MCT | SharePoint, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform Consultant | Contributor on SharePoint StackExchange, MSFT Techcommunity
  • Encodian Owner / Founder - Ex Microsoft Consulting Services - Architect / Developer - 20 years in SharePoint - PowerPlatform Fan
  • Founder of SKILLFUL SARDINE, a company focused on productivity and the Power Platform. You can find me on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/manueltgomes and twitter http://twitter.com/manueltgomes. I also write at https://www.manueltgomes.com, so if you want some Power Automate, SharePoint or Power Apps content I'm your guy 🙂
  • I am the Owner/Principal Architect at Don't Pa..Panic Consulting. I've been working in the information technology industry for over 30 years, and have played key roles in several enterprise SharePoint architectural design review, Intranet deployment, application development, and migration projects. I've been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 15 consecutive years and am also a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Masters (MCSM) since 2013.
  • Big fan of Power Platform technologies and implemented many solutions.
  • Passionate #Programmer #SharePoint #SPFx #M365 #Power Platform| Microsoft MVP | SharePoint StackOverflow, Github, PnP contributor
  • Web site – https://kamdaryash.wordpress.com Youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM149rFkLNgerSvgDVeYTZQ/