Getting Power Platform Dataflows to Load/Sync Data In Dynamics 365 - A How-To Guide

Dataflow can be defined as a collection of tables or data that can be fetched from various sources, cleaned, transformed, and can be loaded in Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Dataverse, or Azure Data Lake Gen2.

To create a Dataflow, login to Power Apps Portal and select the appropriate environment.

https://make.powerapps.com/

Select the down arrow next to Data in the left navigation pane and expand it.

Select Dataflows in the navigation pane and then select New dataflow.

Select Start from blank option.

Provide the name to the data flow and click on Create.

The next screen presents us with all the different data sources supported by Dataflows.

Select Excel as the data source.

Here, Dynamics CRM consultants will import contacts data from OneDrive to Excel into Dynamics 365.

Below is the MyContacts.xlsx excel file in the OneDrive.

The file contains 3 contact records as shown below.

Back in the dataflow wizard, Click on Browse OneDrive.

Select the MyContacts.xlsx file and click on Next in the dataflow wizard.

We can see the data loaded from excel.

Click on Transform Data in the dataflow wizard.

Define the first row as header using User first row as headers option.

This transforms the first row as headers.

Click on Next in the Dataflow wizard, map the query as shown below.

Select Load to an existing table in Load settings.

Clicking on Automap maps the

FirstName

LastName

Map the email field manually and click on Next.

In the next screen, we can define the refresh settings.

Refresh manually -

Refresh automatically – Here we can define the refresh frequency.

For now, we leave it as Refresh manually and click on Create.

This creates our Dataflow.

We can edit, rename, refresh, check refresh history, delete the dataflow as shown below.

The refresh history shows the details of the run like start time, type, duration, status, and action.

Inside Dynamics 365 Sales App, we can see the contact records created as per the records in the excel file.

Get more information here. - Create and use dataflows in Power Apps