Adventures with Power Automate: How to Handle AutoSave in Office Documents

⚔️Problem

Users are updating an Excel spreadsheet that contains a list of Invoices.

When users are completed with their changes, the changes will be sent to a third-party system using either Azure Data Factory or Fabric Pipelines.

This will be accomplished by creating a Power Automate flow that will monitor updates in the Excel spreadsheet.

We only want the updates to be sent to the third-party system when all the changes are completed.

The challenge? Simple, Autosave!

Autosave automatically saves changes every 2 minutes, which will trigger the Power Automate flow, which might lead to unexpected behaviors, such as incomplete data entry for a given row, lack of a review opportunity for the user, etc.

How can we get around this? 🤔

🛠️Solution

The easiest solution I could come up with was leveraging the Check In/Check Out capabilities of the Document library.

First, I create a Document library called Check Out Required.

I clicked on the Gear ⚙️ icon in the top right and then selected Library settings.

I clicked More library settings.

On the Settings page I clicked Version settings.

I set Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited? to Yes and clicked Save.

I created a flow called Delay Update Check Out Required Flow (Automated) that triggers whenever a document in that library is updated and then checks to see if Checked out is true, if so, then it skips the processing of that document, which for my example, is just send a Teams notification.

Idea💡— I think instead of a Condition Action, I could use a Trigger Condition, like @not(empty(triggerOutputs()?['body/CheckoutUserId'])).

One thing I was concerned about was what if a file was never checked in? 😓

Easy fix! I created another flow called Delay Update Checked Out Notifications Send (Scheduled).

This flow would run on a schedule and return a list of files that were still checked out and then send the user a Teams notification letting them know that a file is still checked out.

Idea💡— I would probably time box it, check to see if had been checked out for more than an hour before sending the Teams notification.

Download ⬇️ the solution and check it out for yourself at https://mattruma.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/DelayUpdateSolution_1_0_0_1.zip.

There you go! Problem solved! 🏆

If there is a better way or an easier way, please shared! 🙂