How to Get Microsoft Forms Responses to Excel and Email With Power Automate Easily 2026

Power Automate's home page centers on a Copilot prompt box that invites you to describe an automation in plain language, with a few one-click examples above it, like copying Excel rows between files or emailing you when a SharePoint item is created. You can type your own request there, but building this flow by hand the first time makes it easier to troubleshoot later, since you'll understand what each connector is doing. The left rail has Create, Templates, My flows, and Automation center — the last one is where you'll check run history once the flow is live.

Click Create, choose Automated cloud flow, and give it a descriptive name, something like "Forms to Excel and Email," so it's easy to find later among dozens of others. In the trigger search list, look for "When a new response is submitted," the Microsoft Forms trigger, sitting alongside other common starters like SharePoint's "When an item is created." Select it, click Create, and the flow designer opens with that trigger already on the canvas. Pick your specific form from the dropdown before doing anything else.

The Forms trigger only confirms that something was submitted; it doesn't hand you the answers. Add the "Get response details" action underneath it and connect it to the same form.

Set Response Id using the dynamic content token from the trigger, so each run fetches the specific response that just came in instead of an old one. This step is also where individual question answers become tokens you can drop into the Excel and email steps that follow, the exact fields you defined when you built the form.

Power Automate's Excel connector only writes into named tables, not a plain range of cells with headers. Open the workbook in Excel Online, select the header row plus a few blank rows below it, and use Insert > Table so Excel formats and names it.

Match the column headers to your form's questions: Submission Time, Name, Email, and any custom fields. Back in the flow, add "Add a row into a table," pick the file's location, the workbook, and the table you just created.

Power Automate reads the table's headers and gives you one input box per column; click into each one and insert the matching token from Get response details instead of trusting the auto-fill order. Getting this mapping right the first time is the most common source of blank or misaligned rows.

Add a "Send an email (V2)" action from the Office 365 Outlook connector beneath the Excel step. Write a subject line that says what came in at a glance, something like "New form response from [Name]," using the same token used for Excel.

Build the body out of the individual answer tokens instead of one blob of raw data, so the email reads like a summary and not a debug log. Set the To field to whoever needs to see submissions first; more recipients can be added once the flow is proven out.

Save the flow, then submit a real response to the form to trigger it end to end. Power Automate's run history lights up each step green as it executes: the trigger firing, the response details pulling in, then the Excel and Outlook actions completing in sequence.

Open the Excel table to confirm the new row landed in the right columns, and check the inbox for the notification email. If a step shows a red X instead of green, open it in Automation center. The error message there names the specific problem, like an expired connection or an invalid recipient, more precisely than guessing from the outside.