PowerAutomate/BI on Mac

Sarah Behm

Hi all! Our organization is considering changing our IT infrastructure and we are weighing the pros and cons of PC vs. Mac, Microsoft 365 vs. GSuite. We are curious what the implications would be for Microsoft Power Platforms, specifically for Power Automate. If anyone has any insight or experience with the questions below, I would greatly appreciate your feedback!

• Anyone using Power Automate with only cloud based services (No desktop Microsoft programs)?
• What are the challenges in using Power Automate (PA) on Mac vs. PC that you've faced?
• Any Mac users have experience using an ARM-based architecture operating system (virtual machines/parallels?), the mobile app, or third-party wrappers? Have you found it difficult to create flows through any of these options?
• Anyone using Excel Power Queries with PA? Can you do this with Google Workspace? 
• Do you have to have a Microsoft Outlook account for automated email flows? Can you use Gmail?

• General Excel Q: Google Sheets vs SharePoint Excel vs Desktop Excel - what are the pros and cons? any important tools that are missing from google sheets vs. excel?

Thank you in advance for any help! 😊

Crystal Bruce

Hi @Sarah Behm! Tagging in @Alex Wong and @Dan Snyder to see if they have any insight to share! Also, sub tag for @Erik Leaver to see if any documentation exists for the vs.

Alex Wong

Power Automate on cloud does not care if your OS is PC or Mac, as it loads on internet browser.

You cannot use Excel Power Query with PA cloud flow. Instead, depending on what you want to do, can be achieved with Excel Script (which is a form of TypeScript). If you must use Power Query, Power BI would be the way to go.

PA email flow can use gmail

The excel question can be asked to ChatGPT or similar, will give you what you are looking for. More importantly, what are you trying to use it for and if that specific "excel" handles it.

Dan Snyder

I agree with @Alex Wong and in general the Microsoft Power Platform will work better with other Microsoft products. We are a hybrid shop so I do use some G Suite products as part of my flows, but there are definitely things like 429 too many request errors with Google Sheets that are common and really annoying when trying to build or update a flow.

Sarah Behm

Thank you all for your helpful insights!!

Sarah Behm

@Dan Snyder thank you! as a hybrid shop, do you have any insights if you need to upload files to Google sheets before opening them, after exporting from Blackbaud?

Alex Wong

I am recently working with a client that is a Google shop on an import tool that brings gift from another platform into RE NXT batches and would like to share what I discovered:

• Google Drive and Excel (xlsx) file does not work well together
• There's no "reading excel file" that is stored on google drive
• Can go with Google Sheet file, but reading data in bulk is an issue
• An option is to "copy" the file into OneDrive and work that way, but client does not have OneDrive config
• So in the end, I handle this with the client dropping CSV file instead into Google Drive, then reading the content is just "text" that can be parsed easily with some expression and data action, no loop needed.
  • read csv file
  • Select action
    • From: skip(split(trim(replace(CSV_FILE_CONTENT, decodeUriComponent('%0D%0A'), decodeUriComponent('%0A'))), decodeUriComponent('%0A')), 1)
    • Map: column name (as property name on json), and value is split(item(), ',')?[0]

Now the Select action's dynamic content is an array of excel row data with the mapped properties.

Putting this here, in case anyone want may find it useful.

Dan Snyder

@Sarah Behm I think @Alex Wong has answered your question so not much to add from me.

Sarah Behm

Thank you!