How to Find Your Microsoft Forms Data: Locating the Linked Excel File

This started as a simple question: where is the backend Excel file for my group Forms form stored?

By default, a group form will save responses to an Excel file in the SharePoint site associated with the group. Within that site, the file is stored in the Documents, aka Shared Documents library.

Here is a quick way to track down the file:

With the form open, click on Response.

Click on Open in Excel.

Depending on how your SharePoint library is configured, the file will either download to your computer or open in the browser. Open the file and click on the name or click the down arrow next to it.

When the window opens, it will show exactly where the file is stored.

In this example, the file is stored in the Shared Documents library on the Testing site. Again, this example shows Shared Documents, but on the site, it’s actually named Documents.

STOP, I don’t see the window noted in the above screenshot! This more than likely means you are working with a personal form.

Where is the Excel file stored for personal forms? Not where you’d guess and not anywhere worthwhile. The file is more or less saved with the form and is inaccessible other than downloading it.
Personal Forms response data is now stored in the author’s OneDrive / SharePoint site.

What if I copy my personal form to a group? What will happen to the Excel file?
Don’t do this; just recreate the form from scratch. The copied form will retain the behavior of storing the file with the form, not in SharePoint.

How can I save form responses to a SharePoint list or Dataverse table? You would need to create a Flow to intercept the form response and then save it to the destination.

Will creating a Flow that saves form responses to another destination impact the form saving to Excel? No, the form will always use the backend Excel file as its data storage.

If I download a copy of the backend Excel file, will the downloaded copy be updated with new form submissions? No, the copy is disconnected from the source.

How Do You Get a Power Page Attachment That’s Stored in Blob Storage

My Power App Portal (Power Pages) environments are configured to use Azure blob storage for form attachments. One of the primary reasons for doing this is to avoid filling up expensive dataverse storage with endless attachments submitted by enduers.

This article outlines how to set up Azure storage: link

What I’m going to demo is how to get ONE attachment that’s uploaded to a form. If your form allows multiple attachments, you’d simply loop through them.

In the example, I’m using the soon-to-be-obsolete dataverse connector, but the same basic flow design applies to the normal connector.

When a row is added to my table, the flow is triggered.
The flow then queries the Note (annotation) table using the ID from the source table.
filter query: (_objetid_value eq souce_table_id)

The list rows notes query will result in an array being returned, but I’m only dealing with one attachment, so there’s no need to loop through it. To avoid an unnecessary loop, a function can be used to target a single object from the array: first(body(‘List_rows_Notes’)?[‘value’])?[‘annotationid’]

From the Get row note action, annotationid and filename will be needed to help form the path to the blob. Using the concat function I’m combing the container name, annotationid, and filename. Also, note the transformation on annotationid, the hyphens need to be removed, and the string needs to be lowercase. The last part of the transformation is to remove .azure.txt from the filename.

concat('/blobcontainer/',toLower(replace(outputs('Get_row_Note')?['body/annotationid'], '-', '')),'/', split(outputs('Get_row_Note')?['body/filename'], '.azure.txt')[0])

The end result of the transformation will be:
/blobcontainer/annotationid/filename /blobcontainer/cf03e4cf7f72ad118561002248881923/example.pdf

With the path to the blob formed, the get blob content action can retrieve the file.

It’s that simple.

A couple of notes:
It would be wise to leverage a virus-scanning tool like Cloudmersive.
If you haven’t already noticed, when a user uploads a file that contains special characters in the name…it’s saved to the Note table without the special characters, but when it’s moved to blob storage, the characters will be in the name. Yes, that’s a bug Microsoft has yet to fix. You can avoid this by adding Javascript to the upload page to block files that fall into this category. OR. Write another flow to clean file names before the form is processed.
Example:
Uploaded filename: my report 1:2:3.pdf
Note table: my report 123.pdf
Blob: my report 1:2:3.pdf

Password Complexity Page using Azure B2C and Power Pages

Currently working on a project, and my UX team asked if it was possible to change the look of the B2C sign-up / password change page to include visual hints to meet the password complexity requirements. We’ve all seen it before, you visit a site where you need to sign up, and the password needs to be X characters long and contain this and that, but some sites include a cute visual to help identify what requirements have been met.

image borrowed from jQuery Script


Articles and blog posts I used to get this working:
1. Customize the Azure AD B2C user interface for portals
2. Enable JavaScript and page layout versions in Azure Active Directory B2C
3. JS Password Validation
4. Customize the look and feel of your Azure AD B2C page

If you read the B2C documentation, it’s strongly noted not to use JS libraries outside of the libraries native to B2C. I opted to keep my solution as simple as possible to avoid additional security gaps.

To get this working, I followed the steps outlined in link 1. There I created all of the needed assets in the Portal Management section of the Power Pages environment. Next, I used the content from link 3 to update the Web Template that I created in the previous step. After that, I updated the Web Template to include the div noted in link 4; this is extremely important and can’t be skipped. The last part of the process is to update the B2C user flow policy to reference the page created in step 1.

Here is a copy of my Web Template file from Portal Management.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
      /* Style all input fields */
      input {
        width: 100%;
        padding: 12px;
        border: 1px solid #ccc;
        border-radius: 4px;
        box-sizing: border-box;
        margin-top: 6px;
        margin-bottom: 16px;
      }

      /* Style the submit button */
      input[type="submit"] {
        background-color: #04aa6d;
        color: white;
      }

      /* Style the container for inputs */
      .container {
        background-color: #f1f1f1;
        padding: 20px;
      }

      /* The message box is shown when the user clicks on the password field */
      #message {
        display: none;
        background: #f1f1f1;
        color: #000;
        position: relative;
        padding: 20px;
        margin-top: 10px;
      }

      #message p {
        padding: 10px 35px;
        font-size: 18px;
      }

      /* Add a green text color and a checkmark when the requirements are right */
      .valid {
        color: green;
      }

      .valid:before {
        position: relative;
        left: -35px;
        content: "✔";
      }

      /* Add a red text color and an "x" when the requirements are wrong */
      .invalid {
        color: red;
      }

      .invalid:before {
        position: relative;
        left: -35px;
        content: "✖";
      }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
 <!--this div is the most important part of the process--> 
   <div id="api"></div>
    <div id="message">
      <h3>Password must contain the following:</h3>
      <p id="letter" class="invalid">A <b>lowercase</b> letter</p>
      <p id="capital" class="invalid">A <b>capital (uppercase)</b> letter</p>
      <p id="number" class="invalid">A <b>number</b></p>
      <p id="length" class="invalid">Minimum <b>8 characters</b></p>
    </div>
    
    <script>
      var myInput = document.getElementById("password");
      var letter = document.getElementById("letter");
      var capital = document.getElementById("capital");
      var number = document.getElementById("number");
      var length = document.getElementById("length");

      // When the user clicks on the password field, show the message box
      myInput.onfocus = function () {
        document.getElementById("message").style.display = "block";
      };

      // When the user clicks outside of the password field, hide the message box
      myInput.onblur = function () {
        document.getElementById("message").style.display = "none";
      };

      // When the user starts to type something inside the password field
      myInput.onkeyup = function () {
        // Validate lowercase letters
        var lowerCaseLetters = /[a-z]/g;
        if (myInput.value.match(lowerCaseLetters)) {
          letter.classList.remove("invalid");
          letter.classList.add("valid");
        } else {
          letter.classList.remove("valid");
          letter.classList.add("invalid");
        }

        // Validate capital letters
        var upperCaseLetters = /[A-Z]/g;
        if (myInput.value.match(upperCaseLetters)) {
          capital.classList.remove("invalid");
          capital.classList.add("valid");
        } else {
          capital.classList.remove("valid");
          capital.classList.add("invalid");
        }

        // Validate numbers
        var numbers = /[0-9]/g;
        if (myInput.value.match(numbers)) {
          number.classList.remove("invalid");
          number.classList.add("valid");
        } else {
          number.classList.remove("valid");
          number.classList.add("invalid");
        }

        // Validate length
        if (myInput.value.length >= 8) {
          length.classList.remove("invalid");
          length.classList.add("valid");
        } else {
          length.classList.remove("valid");
          length.classList.add("invalid");
        }
      };      
</script>
</body>
</html>

The idea behind this was to keep it as simple as possible and to get a basic example created. Yes, you can store the file in blob storage, but I wanted to keep all portal parts close together and avoid added complexity. (not that creating this page in Portal Management was easy)

Purge Cache in Power App Portals

This post will be updated to link to a future post that outlines all the different Power App Portals areas. If you have spent more than a few minutes in Portals, you will quickly notice that there is no single place to update or change settings.

How do you purge the cache for a portal?
Navigate to the Power Platform admin center
https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/
Click on Environments and select your environment
Select the portal, then click Purge Cache in the ribbon

edit
The purge cache button won’t always pop up the modal asking if you want to purge the cache. If you visit this page, select your portal site, click the Purge Cache button, and the modal will appear.

https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/resources/portals