Hi! I'm Ben Fetters and I'm an enthusiastic and dedicated SharePoint Architect working for a SharePoint solutions company called SovereignSP. I use SharePoint, PowerApps, and Flow to help provide effective business solutions and now I want to help teach these solutions to others.
I LOVE to teach and just want my viewers to receive the help they need with learning PowerApps, SharePoint, and Flow - especially if they are completely new to it. Please email me if you have any questions or if you would like me to make a video about something you're particularly struggling with need help with and I would be happy to!
You're a life saver! This is the best tutorial: Clear, gives a lot of context to help understand why the system does what it does, and easy to follow! Thanks to you, my flow now works like a charm! Thank you so much!! Subbed!
Hi! I´d like to know if I can do the same with Power Automate Desktop version, I´m traying to replicate the same example but repeating section does not appear on populate word template action on PA Desktop. Thanks for your help
Great question! I would imagine it would be a little difficult then with desktop, I’ll look into that and will let you know, but is there a reason you can’t/don’t want to use a cloud flow to do this instead?
@@sovereignsp thanks for your answer, the main reason is because I need to generate many dynamics pdf files with a SQL query and putting those files on a onpremise location.
@@ederjimenez8 Oh okay, well awesome! Here are my thoughts, hopefully they are helpful: - one option is to use html and create an html file that contains all the data that you would need, then convert that into a PDF. Might take a little more work, but you can make the files how you would need them, with repeating sections/table in html. There's been a few times when I've had to go this route and it works great once you get the html right. - You've probably tried this, but creating a onpremise gateway connection with Power Automate? That could help solve some of the issues related to storing data on premise. Hopefully this is helpful! If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to help.:) Best of luck!
@@sovereignsp Yes, I have an onpremise getaway connection with PA. I ended up solving by using the same way you described on this video. The difference is that my data source is an SQL storage procedure. Of course on cloud version it takes much longer to complete the entire flow. In addition, I had to create a very short PA Desktop flow to download PDF files previously generated. Finally I only need to delete pdf files from OneDrive, cuz I’m not interested in keeping them. THANKS A LOT FOR YOUR SUPPORT👏🏼👍
Are you asking how you can insert a link to a different document? Right now, really the only way to do it is to at the text control and put the link into the control. You can format the text so that it is blue and underlined so that it looks like a link. But, if you convert the document to a PDF, the link will still work really well. Was that what you were asking or am I off?
This is really helpful. Though the input for the repeating content control is sorted, the control is displaying the data in random order. Could you please let me know how we can make it order.
Great video - thanks a lot! I have several .jpg files as attachments to my sharepoint list item. Let's say it is photo copy receipts of travel expenses for my travel expense report. Or som photos documenting your invoice lines in this video. Do you know if it would be possible to loop through the attachments and populate the jpeg as a repeating table of pictures?
Thanks! Great question and great scenario! images don't work in repeating sections to my knowledge :( But, you can use Adobe Merge PDF and possibly convert the images into a pdf, then merge them all together along with your populated word template if that makes sense?
Hi Great video and thanks for the detailed explanation. However, could you please explain how to convert populated word document in SharePoint to Pdf. I tried with "Convert Word Document to PDF" and it is not working. Kindly help.
I am using the 'convert word document to PDF' action as my document is saved in a SharePoint folder. I'm then using body/itemid to look up the dynamic file but the flow failed at this stage because it could not find the file. Any ideas?
I have few questions and I will be highly obliged if you answer those questions. 1. What if we need to populate a word document template from excel. Based on excel cell values, we need to skip few pages from the word document template. Is it possible to do using Power Automate? 2. Is it possible to do this using word document template residing in desktop and excel file residing in desktop instead of sharepoint. Thanking you in anticipation.
Great questions! As long as you add the fields as I do in the video, it doesn't matter where they are in the document, so yes, it "skip a few pages". As for the excel file, you'd technically need to use a desktop flow to get data from an excel file that is on your desktop, but you could use OneDrive instead of SharePoint and still do a Cloud flow (the type of Power Automate flow I use in the video). let me know if you have any other questions or need anymore help on this, I'd love to help!
HI Ben, thanks for this! do you happen to know how to do this with something that needs to print multiple instances per page? Something like name badges or barcode images.
Great question! The repeating section control could possibly handle what you're wanting to do, but I would perhaps try using the Print() or PDF() function in Power Apps. That would more likely be able to handle something complex like that. Feel free to email me at ben.fetters@sovereignsp.com if you'd like anymore guidance with that and I'd be happy to help. :) Sounds like a fun project!
As of right now, I don't believe there is a way! Hopefully one day they'll add that functionality. But, if you're using Power Apps, Power Apps does now have a PDF() and a Print() function if you didn't know all ready, which would allow you to do some formatting etc.
Thanks for the video Ben. Can you help explain how I can include the same value multiple times in the same document? I have given fields the same name in the document but don't want to have to enter each one several times.
Great question! You might just have to enter the same value, but I think you may be able to use bookmarks in word to reference a piece of info in your document. I'm imagining you have a ton of the same field value, so I would add one text input control, set it as a bookmark, then reference that bookmark everywhere else that you need to display that information. I believe that should work, let me know if it doesn't! :)
Hi - I want the user to be able to create their own text via a power app UI and to populate a word document. Some of the text will have numerical values. Is that possible?
Great video Ben. One question, when creating the Word template and adding the content control properties, you did not use the “Tag” property- other videos I have seen they always recommend adding the same name in the “Tag” property. What is the Tag property used for? Thanks!
Thanks! Good question. Usually word will automatically change it to what you name it if you leave it blank, but I believe it shows up in the hint text on the populate a word template action. Either way, I’ve never encountered any troubles with adding it or not if that’s helpful :)
right click on the ribbon and select "edit ribbon settings" or something like that (not sure what it's in English). There you can check off the Developer.
Hi there, Watched your video regarding breaking the inheritance. And wanted to tell you it was really helpful to me. But i've a question regarding this. i wanted to know if it's possible to break the inheritance for owners too. For example: Owners have full control but I want their permissions to read only for a particular item in the list.
Hello, have you tried changer flow which changes all users of the file from Edit to View permissions? It seems to work way from View to Edit but doesnt do ANYTHING from edit to view. And Powerautomate doesnt write an error it grants the View permission in the flow... Any ideas? I tried Stop sharing in the loop, but we have many persons on one file and then the loop doesnt work for this case.
just in case you want to do this effect on an image all you have to do is go to the image Transparency property and go like this: 1- (timer1.value/timer1.duration) it took me like 2 hours to figure this out... hope it helps
Hi Ben - This is so helpful. Thank you! Along with taking your list items and eventually putting to a PDF - I need to also translate Spanish into English for the PDF. Where would you do that? Would it be in a flow before creating the documents or after they're created? I also need to file the pdf in a specific folder for each list item. Can you help me with these challenges?
pretty cumbersome to do it for every flow, I wish there was a real dashboard with notification capabilities. Something that looks like the one build it from the beginning of the video
I have a PDF Form, I want to add drop down menus to it, and based on the selection it only gives certain answers in other sections, or autofill's sections based on answers
Hey Ben! I came across your very helpful video when looking for a way to change permissions for a SharePoint group across multiple sites. I have about 40 sites where a SP group is used on all those sites. Currently the group has Edit rights and I want to change to Contribute rights. The change is not specific to a list or library, but everywhere that SP group is used. I set the workflow to use a manual trigger. Using the HTTP Request, I was able to get the ID of the group (_api/web/sitegroups/getbyname('Group Name Members')), use a Parse JSON to extract the ID, and then finally use a second HTTP Request to Post the change (_api/web/roleassignments/addroleassignment(principalID=@{body('Parse_JSON')?['body']?['d']?['Id']},roledefid=1073741827), but am getting the error "web/roleassignments/addroleassignment(principalID=,roledefid=1073741827)" is not valid. In the error message, the principalID is blank. Do you have any recommendations?
Could I ask another question? I have a SharePoint form that has attachments in it and I would like to add the link to that attachment into the word template and than to the pdf . Have you done this?
Is there any workaround if I receive a downloadable link in Outlook and then to open it (save it) in certain folder? Or if you know some links where I can find it. Thx
