How to extract an excel file like an archive in One Drive folder using Power Automate

With Office 2003, Microsoft have changed the way an excel is formatted. From excel 2003, excel files are essentially zip files. If you change the excel file extension to .zip you should be able to extract the contents of the excel file into a folder.

What if you need to automate this process in your One Drive. For example – a user upload an excel file in One Drive folder. The excel file components then need to extracted into a folder, similar to how you extract the components of an archive.

We can easily do this using few simple steps in Power Automate. Let’s check this.

For this example, I use an instant flow with manual trigger. I have my test excel file – DemoFile.xlsx and a folder Extracted where I am going to extract the components of the excel file.

As a first step in the flow, I use the Copy File action to convert the .xlsx file to .zip file.

The next step is to extract the contents of the zip to the extracted folder. For this I use the Extract archive to folder action for OneDrive for Business connector.

The path of the zip file I take from the previous step.

Well that’s it. Now when I run the flow, the extract folder contains the excel components.

Hope this helped!

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Hope this helped!

Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP