Sharing my Power Automate template: Fast Save to Excel Without Looping

Alex Wong
Alex Wong Community All-Star
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 3 Raiser's Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge
in SKY Developer General Discussions

- Description: Saving to SharePoint location Excel file List of data (i.e. constituent, gift, etc). This is a faster approach than “adding a row to excel" 1 record at a time. Note that the template is for you to see how to do fast saving, so it's not meant to be tailer to what may be your business process. I just list 100 constituent record and have some data info saved to excel to demo the fast saving. You can do a gift export save to excel in sharepoint and do other things with it. (such as load into power bi for reporting)


- Required connections: Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT Constituents; Excel Online (Business); Office 365 Groups; SharePoint;


- Suggested skill level required to use this template: Intermediate/Advanced


- Configuration details:

  • Download Column Number to Letter.xlsx and save it in SharePoint somewhere
  • OPTIONAL: Download CommonFormat.zip extract the CommonFormat.osts file and save it to your OneDrive > Documents > Office Scripts folder
    • There is an action at the last step of the process to do a nice common format (autofit columns, autofit rows, freeze header row, make the data range a table and give it a table name of “GiftTable” (which you can change in editing the script, not in scope for this post)


- Category: Data Management


- Instructions:

  • Download FastSaveExcel_20231114201041.zip and import in Power Automate
  • In Editing the flow:
    • Update the Create Excel File action to create excel file in the sharepoint location of your choice
    • Update the Compose Excel Header action to have the columns of your choosing
    • Update the Compose ResultSet Data action to have the actual data of your choosing
    • Update the Get Column Letter action to point to where you saved the Column Number to Letter.xlsx file in SharePoint.
    • If you did not (or unable to) save the CommonFormat Office Script, then delete the Run Script Common Format action
  • Important Note: you need to ensure the Compose Excel Header action and Compose ResultSet Data action have the same number of columns.

Comments

  • Candy Reichert
    Candy Reichert
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Alex Wong
    I would like my daily gift list to automatically add yesterdays gifts to a Sharepoint excel sheet.. Would this be a better way to daily add gifts to an excel sheet in Sharepoint directly from NXT, instead of setting up a scheduled REQueue using the Sharing my Power Automate template: RE:Queue CSV to SharePoint Excel Table template?
    I have that one just about set to run, then saw this. So I was wondering if it would be better to just go with this one instead? Do you know how long it will be before REQueue wil be unusable?

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 3 Raiser's Edge NXT Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge

    @Candy Reichert
    to be clear, this template is for making saving “data” to excel faster (no need to save 1 data row at a time), not specifically related to what you are talking about.

    There are multiple ways to “get” the data you want to save, RE:Queue > SFTP one way.

    Another way is to use Gift List, many of the template for Daily gift digest can be used depending on what data you want in the excel file.

    Another way (newer) is to use Query API.

    Once you got the data using one of the method above, you can use this “fast save” method to create the excel file and save to SharePoint

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