The field of type ‘Note’ cannot be used in the query filter expression error in Power Automate

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. In today’s blog I will discuss about a new requirement which is quite common but the solution to it is not straightforward as expected.

The requirement is pretty simple. I have a SharePoint List for my Report Inventory which has a Description column.

The description is an Out of the box column in SharePoint which is of type – “Multiple Lines of Text”.

In my Power Automate flow, I want to retrieve all the List items for which Description is empty and then update the Description to a some default value.

I used the Get Items connector to perform this operation. Observe the Filter Query where I am using Description field.

I execute the flow and quite strangely I see the below error.

Quite obvious from the above screenshot, we cannot use Multi-line of Text field in Filter expressions of Get Items connector. Multiline of Text fields are also referred to as Note in SharePoint.

Unfortunately there is no hack here for the connector to accept to the Multiline text field in the Filter expression. The workaround is to filter the items after retrieval. While not the most elegant way, this is the way to do this for now.

So let’s see the next steps. Remove the field from your Filter query. You can keep other filter queries which are supported. And use the ‘Filter Array’ action. Illustration in the below screenshot.

Hope Microsoft resolves this soon. But till then you can follow this workaround. Do let me know if you have a better way to do it. I would love to know of that.

Hope this helped. You will also like the below posts.

Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP