Power Automate: Export SharePoint List to Excel (Guide)

Power Automate: Export SharePoint List to Excel (2025 Guide)

Last Updated on September 14, 2024

Want to export a SharePoint list?

In this guide, I will walk you through easily exporting a SharePoint list to Excel using Power Automate.

Let’s get started.

What is Power Automate?

If you’re here, then you must already be familiar with Power Automate.

Basically, it’s a tool that would let you automate workflows between different apps and services. 🙂

Understand your business better than ever

Some key features include:

Power Automate is an excellent solution if you want automation involving different apps, especially for Microsoft services.

It improves productivity by allowing you to focus on more important tasks while it handles the repetitive work in the background. 🙂

👉 Related: Key Benefits of Power Automate: Future of Automation

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    Creating a Flow to Export SharePoint List Data

    Fortunately, this one isn’t that complicated to implement.

    Bonus: Create with Copilot

    Copilot has been amazing as it can help you save time. 🤩

    You can always build the flow from scratch, but if you’re comfortable with Copilot, just enter this prompt:

    I want to export a SharePoint list data, once a week. The export file should be in CSV.
    generate a flow to export a list with copilot

    After clicking the generate button, you will see a suggested flow.

    If you like that, simply click the “next” button and it will take you to the flow editor.

    accept the suggested flow to export a list

    If you used the same prompt that I did, you will likely get the same suggestion. 🙂

    There are some variations here in the last step, but all of them will enable you to export the file.

    Step 1: Create a new instant flow

    Now, whether or not you generated the flow with Copilot, you would need to enter the parameters.

    Those are the same ones that you need to set up here in the steps, which starts from creating a new instant cloud flow.

    Like this:

    triggered manually as needed

    Just skip the naming part and go directly to adding a trigger.

    Since you want a solution using Power Automate, it’s likely that you want this process to repeat x times.

    Anyway, just find the “recurrence” trigger first:

    start with the recurrence trigger

    You can set this up according to your needs.

    For example, you can set it up to run maybe once a day at a specific hour (you can set it up right inside the parameters).

    You can even specify the minutes. 😅

    set the parameters of recurrence to once a day

    Nice! 🙂

    Step 2: Retrieve the list

    After that, you will need to add an action.

    We want to keep this simple, so you can just use the “get items” action for SharePoint.

    Again, you can just search for it:

    get items from sharepoint action

    The parameters are also fairly simple.

    Simply identify the SharePoint site address and then the name of the list (there’s a dropdown and just choose the right one).

    Like this:

    configure the parameters of the get items action

    There are advanced parameters you can use to filter the results, which is important if you have so many items in the list.

    Step 3: Create a table

    You then have to add the “create CSV table” data operation as an action.

    Again, just search for it:

    create csv table data operation

    As for parameters, there are two settings here:

    • From (source)
    • Advanced parameters

    For the from parameter, click the empty field then on the blue lightning to enter data from a previous step.

    Then select the body/value option (it’s the only option):

    get items body value as parameter

    For the advanced parameters, it’s optional, but you can use it to identify which columns to display.

    For example, if you have 10 columns, and you only want to show 3 columns in the Excel file, you can do it here.

    Here’s what it would look like:

    specify the columns to include

    We’re almost there. 🙂

    Step 4: Create the file

    The last part is the creation of the file itself.

    For this, we need the “create file” action in SharePoint (look for it, there are many create file actions for different apps).

    Like this:

    create file in sharepoint for the exported list

    For the parameters, just choose where to save the file in SharePoint, including the folder path.

    For the file name, you can put whatever you want — I added a formula on mine that would add a timestamp.

    What’s important in the file name is the extension — don’t forget the .csv extension. 👈

    For the file content, just select the output, similar to what you can see here:

    parameters for the create file action

    After that, just save and test the Power Automate flow. 🙂

    Here’s what I got:

    exported sharepoint list in csv

    Nice and easy! 🙂

    Automating SharePoint to Excel Exports

    As you can see, it’s not as complicated as it seems, especially now that we can use Copilot inside Power Automate.

    This flow can handle data extraction, formatting, and file saving of the list, which reduces manual effort on your side.

    Anyway, got any questions regarding exporting a list to Microsoft Excel? Let me know below.

    For any business-related queries or concerns, contact me through the contact form. I always reply. 🙂

    About Ryan Clark

    As the Modern Workplace Architect at Mr. SharePoint, I help companies of all sizes better leverage Modern Workplace and Digital Process Automation investments. I am also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for SharePoint and Microsoft 365.

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