1. Product updates

Announcing support for Office Scripts in the Excel Online (Business) connector

, , יום רביעי 01 יולי 2020

The Excel Online (Business) connector has been a valuable part of the Power Automate ecosystem for some time now. It has a wide variety of applications—most of which are, however, relatively basic. Until now, the connector could only do things like reading rows from a table or writing data to a specific cell.

We are pleased to announce that support for running Office Scripts is available for public preview starting today. Office Scripts allow you to accomplish a vast array of tasks and complex sequences of actions. Effectively any operation possible in Excel for the Web is now achievable programmatically. This is exciting even for those without programming experience; just like UI Flows, the script recorder in Excel allows you to record your actions and play them back—all without manually writing a single line of code. For those looking to achieve more complex scenarios, scripts can also be written and edited via the Code Editor.

To learn more about Office Scripts and the new “Run script” action, visit the documentation here.

Example applications

Some example applications include:

  • Sending an email status report to one’s broader team every Monday at 9am
  • Processing data submitted to Microsoft Forms and visualizing it using Excel’s charting engine
  • Storing information about tweets which include a particular hashtag in a spreadsheet, then alerting a Teams channel about the update
  • Examining a team’s status tracking spreadsheet for completion and sending a both email and teams reminders to colleagues who have yet to complete their assigned sections
  • Fetching issue data from a GitHub repository and summarizing and visualizing it for use in a report

 

Example of a flow which uses two “Run script” actions to automatically remind team members to complete their status reports

Prerequisites

In order to run Office Scripts via Power Automate, the following must be true:

  • Your organization must have enabled Office Scripts via the switch in the Office Admin Portal
  • Your organization must have enabled Power Automate and the Excel Online (Business) connector

The addition of the new “Run script” action to the Excel connector dramatically expands its applications and capabilities, far beyond what was previously possible. It also makes previously achievable scenarios much easier. The team has been working diligently on this feature for some time now, and we’re excited to see what you, the community, can do with it.

Learn more about the “Run script” action and using Office Scripts with Power Automate