Insert Column and Row into Excel Worksheet using Power Automate Desktop

You can insert a row or a column in an Excel sheet that is present in your local system by using Power Automate desktop. In this tutorial, I will cover the way to insert a new column as well as a new row in an Excel worksheet using Power Automate desktop.

Insert Column to Excel Worksheet using Power Automate Desktop

I will show you here how to insert a column into an Excel worksheet using Power Automate Desktop.

Suppose you have a dataset as shown below, and you want to add a new column to the left of column D.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Open your Power Automate desktop app, click on the + New button -> Select Flow -> Provide a name for the flow in the Create a flow dialogue box. Then, click on the Create button.

2. Under the Actions pane, search for “Launch Excel” in the search box. Then, drag and drop it to the workspace. I will take an existing Excel data, ie, Customer Contacts. Provide the parameters.
   • Launch Excel: Choose and open the following document option.
   • Document path: Click on {x} -> Select your document
   • Make instance visible: Toggle this on to make the Excel instance visible while executing the flow.

This will produce ExcelInstance as a variable. Then, click on the Save button.

3. To add a new column to the Excel worksheet, add the “Insert column to Excel worksheet” action to the workspace. This action will insert a column to the left of a selected column. Set the parameters.
   • Excel instance: It will be added by default, using the variable produced in the previous step.
   • Column: Enter the column where you want to add a new column to the left of it.

4. You can also display the message that the column has been successfully inserted into the Excel worksheet by adding a “Display message” box. Set the required properties. Click on the Save button.
   • Message box title: Provide a title for the message box.
   • Message to display: Enter the text to display.
   • Message box icon: Select the Information icon from the drop-down.

5. After that, drag and drop the “Close Excel” action to close the Excel worksheet. Set the parameters. Click on Save.
   • Before closing Excel: Select the Save document option.

6. Now, the flow is ready to save and run. You can see that after the flow execution is completed, a new column will be added to the Excel worksheet.

Check Out: Add Row to Excel Table Power Automate

Add Row in Excel Worksheet using Power Automate Desktop

Here, I will show you how to row in an Excel worksheet using Power Automate Desktop.

To illustrate this example, I will use the Excel sheet referenced in the example mentioned above.

You can follow the same steps as mentioned above to add a new row to an Excel Worksheet. But replace “Insert column to Excel worksheet” with “Insert row to Excel worksheet.”

1. On the left navigation, search for Excel under the Actions pane. Then, drag and drop the “Insert row to Excel worksheet” action. This will insert a row above the selected row of an Excel sheet.
   • Excel instance: By default, it will add an Excel variable from the previous steps.
   • Row index: Enter the row number where you want to insert the new row above it.

Click on the Save button to save the action to the workspace.

Now, the flow is ready. Save and run the flow.

2. When the flow execution is completed, a new row will be added to the Excel worksheet above the existing row, based on the value specified in the “Insert row to Excel worksheet” action. Have a look at the reference image.

This is how you can insert a column and row into an Excel Worksheet using Power Automate Desktop.

In this tutorial, I will explain how to insert rows and columns into an excel worksheet using Microsoft Power Automate Desktop.

You may also like the following tutorials:

• Extract Data From a Web Page to Excel Using Power Automate Desktop
• Connect Power Automate Desktop to Cloud
• Create a CSV Table From Excel File Power Automate
• Extract Tables from a PDF Power Automate Desktop
• Count Rows & Columns in SpreadSheet by Power Automate Desktop

Bijay Kumar

After working for more than 18 years in Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), I thought will share my SharePoint expertise knowledge with the world. Our audiences are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. For my expertise knowledge and SharePoint tutorials, Microsoft has been awarded a Microsoft SharePoint MVP (12 times). I have also worked in companies like HP, TCS, KPIT, etc.