In this tutorial, Jonathon Silva walks through a practical use case in Power Automate, demonstrating how to properly handle multi-choice responses from Microsoft Forms and store them in SharePoint. This scenario highlights a common issue many users encounter when working with dynamic data—especially when dealing with multi-select fields—and provides a clean, scalable solution using JSON formatting and the Select action.
Jonathon Silva begins by outlining the objective: capturing responses from a Microsoft Form and storing them in a SharePoint list. The form includes three fields:
While text and single-choice fields transfer smoothly into SharePoint, the multi-choice field introduces formatting challenges. Instead of storing clean, readable values, SharePoint displays the data in a JSON-like format with unwanted characters such as backslashes.
When Jonathon Silva runs the initial Power Automate flow, the multi-select responses are stored incorrectly. Instead of seeing individual values like “Red” and “Blue,” the output appears as a structured JSON string. This happens because SharePoint expects data in a specific array format, but Power Automate passes it as raw JSON text.
This mismatch creates issues not only for readability but also for future reporting and data analysis, especially when integrating with tools like Power BI.
The tutorial walks through the foundational steps of building the flow:
For standard fields like name and age group, dynamic content can be directly mapped into SharePoint columns. However, the multi-choice field requires additional transformation before it can be stored correctly.
To resolve the formatting problem, Jonathon Silva introduces JSON transformation within Power Automate. By analyzing the output of the “Get response details” step, he identifies that the multi-select data must be reshaped into a proper array format.
The key is to remove unnecessary escape characters and structure the data in a way SharePoint can interpret correctly.
The solution involves adding a Select data operation before the SharePoint “Create item” step. This action allows users to transform the structure of the incoming data.
The process includes:
By doing this, each selected option (e.g., Red, Blue) is treated as an individual entry rather than part of a single string.
Jonathon Silva demonstrates how to configure the Select action step-by-step:
This transformation ensures that the output matches the format expected by SharePoint’s multi-choice column.
Once the Select action is configured, its output is used as the input for the SharePoint “Create item” step. Instead of manually entering values or relying on raw dynamic content, the flow now pulls structured data directly from the Select action.
This results in clean, properly formatted entries within the SharePoint list.
After implementing the solution, Jonathon Silva tests the flow multiple times. The results confirm that:
This improved structure makes the data easier to work with for reporting, filtering, and integration with other tools.
Properly formatting multi-choice data is critical for maintaining data integrity and usability. By leveraging Power Automate’s Select action and JSON transformation capabilities, users can:
Jonathon Silva’s tutorial provides a clear and practical solution to a common Power Automate challenge. By understanding how data is structured and using built-in transformation tools, users can significantly improve how information flows between Microsoft Forms and SharePoint.
This approach not only solves immediate formatting issues but also sets a strong foundation for scalable and reliable data automation processes.
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