Excel Batch Delete (40x Faster)
Instead of performing a slow 1 deletion per action, these flows send arrays of deletion primary keys to an Office Script. On the Excel side the script can then delete each row it finds with a primary key in the deletion input array.
In testing the flow completes 1500 row deletions per minute, about 40x faster than the standard Excel delete row actions at max 50 concurrency. And it accomplished each 750 deletions with less than 8 actions or about 1% of the standard 750 action API calls.
The "results" output of the Run script action returns the change in the number of rows, so the number of rows removed since the script started running. The last few actions will check if the number of rows in the deletion array match the change in number of rows & force a flow failure to make it clear that there was an error.
Office Script Code V3 (Also included in a Compose action at the top of the template flow)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yLqB9Od_r3Mk9wvzBqubBO2bMzm4Ye3U/view?usp=sharing
You can download the Version 3 of this template attached to this post, copy the Office Script code into an online Excel instance, & try it out for yourself.
-Open an online Excel workbook, go the the automate tab, select New Script, then copy & paste the Office Script code into the code editor. You may want to name the script BatchDeleteV3.
-Once you get the template flow into your environment, follow the notes in the flow to change the settings to your datasources, data, & office scripts.
- ExcelBatchDeleteV3 is the core piece.
- ExcelBatchDeleteV3Sync includes a simplified method of filtering to just the rows in Excel that are not in another dataset, but is limited to data sources & Excel tables with 100,000 rows or less.
- ExcelBatchDeleteV3b includes a Do until loop set-up if you plan on deleting more than 750 rows in a single flow run. It also includes a fuller set-up that can filter to just the rows in Excel that are not in another dataset with a 300,000 table row limit that can be further expanded by following the pattern of intersections, joins, & filters in the "Get all data, filter to items in destination not in source" Scope.
Also be aware that some characters in column names, like \ / - _ . : ; ( ) & $ may cause errors when processing the data. Also backslashes \ in the data, which are usually used to escape characters in strings, may cause errors when processing the JSON.
And please remember to check your dataset & who might be using parts of it before running a large batch delete that may affect their work.
Thanks for any feedback!
Thanks for the quick reply.
This is at the initial import stage -- can't even get past that, so never get to the point where I can edit the flow and customize actions, etc...
@rbunge
That's really strange, I still get the link to visit the flow & fix things.
But if you are still not getting that link, then you can try importing the attached file where I removed all the Excel actions. You'll have to go back through and re-add them with the help of the pictures below...
