Read from an Excel document
Now that we have an instance of Excel in our flow, we can use the Read an Excel worksheet action to retrieve the data from the document, which allows it to be processed and modified in flows.
In the search bar on the left hand side, search for Read from an Excel Worksheet and drag it into the main flow editor.
Read contents of a single cell
Select the Excel instance and specify the range of data to read. Set the Retrieve option to The value of a single cell to retrieve the contents of a single cell, and then specify the cell location with the Column and Row properties.
Read contents of a table
To extract a table of data, set Retrieve to the Values from a range of cells option. Define the table by the coordinates in the Start column/row and End column/row properties. Specify the column by its letter or corresponding number. For example, you can enter column E, row 8 or column 5, row 8 for cell E8. This output will be of a datatable type variable.
Power Automate Desktop Variables store contents based on their datatype. For example, a date is stored as a datetime variable. To store all data as text, select the Get cell contents as text option. When selecting to read values from a range of cells, select First line of range contains column names to ignore the first row. To ignore the type of data in the cell and retrieve the contents as text, select Get cell contents as text. Change these properties in the Advanced section.
Alternatively, select cells in the document to which the instance is assigned, and use the Values from selection option to retrieve the values of the currently selected cells. To retrieve all data from an Excel worksheet, select All available values from worksheet in the Retrieve field.
