Create Excel and PDF documents from Microsoft Forms in Power Automate

Create a new process

Go to the Processes section in your Plumsail account.

Click on the Add process button.

Set the Process name. As we’re going to generate PDF documents from an Excel template, select XLSX for the template type.

Configure a template

Once you’re done with the first step Create Process, press the Next button, and you’ll proceed to the next step – Configure Template.

It includes two substeps:

• Editor;

• Settings.

In Editor, you can compose the template from scratch or upload a pre-made one. It’s also possible to modify the uploaded template online.

Feel free to download an XLSX template that we have already prepared. It’s a short employee information sheet:

Then upload it to the process.

Test template

You can test a template as well, to see how it will look at the end. After clicking on the Test template button, you will see the dialog where you can fill in the auto-generated testing form. Form fields are created based on tokens from your document template. You can adjust the look of the testing form by changing token types.

It’s testing. We’re going to apply the data from the MS Form to our template.

Once you’ve tested the template, press Save&Next to proceed further - to the Settings substep.

Here, please:

• Switch to an active mode to remove Plumsail watermarks from resulting documents

• Fill in the name of the result file

• Select PDF format for the output file

• Protect the result PDF if you wish

Once you’ve customized all the settings, you can test the template to see the result as we did it before.

When everything is done here, click on Save & Next to set up deliveries.

Delivery

The next step is delivery. For demonstrating purpose, we’ll store the result file in OneDrive. But there are other options.

Select the folder where the ready document will be saved.

You can configure as many deliveries as you need.

Start the Process

We will start our Process from Power Automate (Microsoft Flow).

Form is submitted

We need to start the Flow every time somebody submits our form. For that, search for Microsoft Forms in Power Automate and set Microsoft Forms - When a response is submitted as a trigger.

If this is your first Flow with Microsoft Forms, on this step, sign in to your Microsoft Forms Account from MS Flow to use your forms inside Flows.

Then, you’ll need to pick the form you want to track in the dropdown.

Get response details

As we want to extract data from Microsoft form, we need to add Microsoft Forms - Get response details action. On this action, we select the same Form Id that we used in the trigger. Then, we click in the Response Id text box and pick List of response notifications - Response Id in the Dynamic content menu on the right:

Start document generation process

This is the action from Plumsail Documents connector. This action is suitable for starting the Process of generating documents from a template. You can find more information about this action by visiting this page.

Using the action for the first time, you’ll be asked for ‘’Connection Name’’ and ‘’Access Key’’.

You can type any name for the connection. For example, ‘’Plumsail Documents’’.

Then create an API key in your Plumsail Account page, copy and paste it to ‘’Access Key’’ field.

The action has two parameters:

• Process name. Select the process you need from available ones.

• Template data. Specify source data in JSON format:

This object contains information from our form. We selected the dynamic content from the output of Microsoft Forms - Get response details action:

Use the ready document in Flow

You can stop on the step Start document generation process.

Steps described above are enough for generating PDFs from an XSLX template based on the Microsoft Form submission. Your result file will be saved to OneDrive in this case. See how it will look:

But if you need an advanced logic, it’s possible to work with the result file right in the Flow.

Here is an example of how you can send the ready document for approval.

Add an action Create an approval from the Approvals connector. Select an output of the previous step for an attachment.