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Editable invoice pdf for Research and Development

hey everyone it's John here and in this video we're going to take a look at the Microsoft flow word connectors so we're going to use them to create a PDF invoice based on SharePoint list so here's my SharePoint list and in it I've got an invoice number and some other data here and we're going to take the product field and the amount field and add it into an invoice based on the invoice number and generate a PDF from that so to do that I've got a word document set up here for my invoice and in order to use this with flow I need to add some content controls so we can do that in the developer tab and if you don't have the Developer tab in your ribbon you can go up to the ribbon and right click and customize the ribbon and then you just need to make sure that the Developer tab is checked here and you press ok and that should give you this tab right here so all the content controls are right here and to populate data into our invoice number we're going to select that into this plain text content control so I can click on that and you can see that we get that little box around our number and we're going to go to the properties and give that a name and that's how we're going to reference it in flow so let's call that invoice number and press ok and now we need to do the same thing for our invoice items now our invoice items are going to be repeating content so we don't know how many items we have but luckily there's a content control for repeating tables so you can select the first row in our table and go up to the repeating section content control and click on that again we're going to name it let's name it invoice items and press ENTER and within the repeating section we also need to add a Content control for each of the fields so we can select our description and insert a plain text content control and name that as well let's call that item description and press ok and also for our amount and we're gonna name that - let's call that item amount and that's okay and in this example we're not gonna worry about any of the other fields like the dates or the grand totals but the other thing we're gonna do is add in a signature so we can add in a picture and we can then add in a picture of a signature so let's go up and add in a picture content control here and let's name that and press ok and I'm just gonna resize this a little bit in the picture format tab and I'm going to unlock the aspect ratio so that I can have it has more of a rectangle yeah let's press okay that's gonna fit my signature a little bit better and now we're ready to go into flow so we need to save this in either SharePoint or onedrive and that mine's already saved in onedrive so I can just close out of this and head over to my flow and now what we're gonna do in this example is create a flow based on a button trigger so we're just going to give our trigger an invoice number and that's going to populate our word document and then we're going to convert that word document into a PDF so let's create a new flow and instant and from our button and create and let's add a text input for that so let's call that invoice number and the first step we're gonna do is get our SharePoint data so let's get items and there's a get items from SharePoint action let's use that and we can just navigate to our list and we don't want to return all the items so we're gonna use the Advanced Options to filter our query and we're going to filter it based on the invoice column now there's a little trick here that took me a while to figure out but the first column is actually referenced by title and not the actual name of the column in a SharePoint list so so we're going to be filtering on the title column and we're going to return data whenever that's equal to our invoice number and because that's a text field in our case we're going to add some single quotes around that and now let's add in our populate word document step and again we just need to navigate to that template in onedrive for business and there it is and then that's going to return those content fields that we just created so here's our invoice number and for that we can populate it based on our trigger invoice number and then we have that repeating content section here so we have the invoice items and items description and an item amount and if we know exactly how many rows of data we're gonna add we can't add them this way and create different rows for each item but we don't know ours is going to be a variable amount of rows based on the invoice number so instead of this we're going to need to switch to the input the entire array so let's do that and we'll come back to this later this this guy here the invoice signature we're going to first have to get our picture so above this step we're gonna add an action to get a file from onedrive so onedrive for business and if we scroll down we can get file content is the one we need and then we can navigate to our signature and the signature is maybe something that you're going to be getting from it maybe a power apps pen input and in this example we're just grabbing a single file from onedrive and here's our signature and then in our word step we can add that signature with the file content now after we populate a heart word template we actually need to create a word file based on that template so we need to create a file and then this is the file that we're going to convert into PDF so let's create a file and onedrive we're just gonna add it into the same folder as everything else that folder there and then we also need to give it a name so let's just call it invoice so let's just call it invoice template and we'll call it populated and here we need to give it the word extension so docx and the final content is going to be from our populate word template action so right here and now we're gonna add a step for converting that word document to a PDF so we're going to use the second word connector convert word document to PDF and here we're gonna navigate to our file and this time we're not going to select a file because it hasn't been created yet what we're going to do is from the create file step we're going to use the path that is generated so this path has the folder and file name in it and the last step is so this converts the word document to PDF but we actually need to create the file as well so again we're going to add a create file step for our onedrive for business and we're gonna put it in the same folders here and we can give it a name of invoice and you also need to add in the PDF extension so dot PDF and the contents of the file cam from this step here so here's our convert Word document to PDF and PDF document so you can save this and let's just give it a name as well yeah let's save and we can test that out let's try it out so we're not going to be populating our table data with the SharePoint list items but it'll do all the other actions so we're just gonna test that out right now and let's just add in a number and then it's gonna run through all those steps and if we go into our folder here you'll see that we got this invoice PDF and let's just take a look at it too quickly so here we have invoice number two we didn't add that yet we'll do that in a bit and here's our signature that's pretty cool let's close that out and let's go back to flow and let's just edit this now and what we're gonna have to do now is for this invoice items we actually need to create a array variable with our data in it so the items that we got from SharePoint we have all the columns in our SharePoint list we only need the two columns so we want the product and the amount column so if we had in the items directly in here we're gonna have too many items and we also don't have the proper column names from our content controls so let's go up to here and add an action and we're going to create a variable for that array so let's initialize a variable and we're gonna call it invoice items array and it'll be an array and initial value nothing so we're gonna be populated in it in the next step so let's add in a set variable step or rather append to array variable step let's use that and we're going to be adding to our invoice items all right and we're gonna be appending for each item in this gap variables so we actually also need to add the each item step so there's applied to each step let's use that and let's put this guy in there and we're going to be using values from our get items so let's add that in and now the way to set up an array we need curly braces for our array and I mean need the items in our array so this one our first one is going to be item description which is the name of our content control in our word document and then a colon and then we're gonna add that from our dynamic content from our get items so that was called product and our SharePoint list there we go and then a comma and our next item is item I mouse and a colon game and we're gonna use the amount from the get items and that's gonna be our array there now let's go back to our populate step and we can add that array in so invoice items array and let's save that let's test that out again and this time let's try a different number and run the flow and there we go it ran successfully let's head over to our folder now and there's our PDF so we can see that it was modified at 10:30 which is right now let's open it up and there we go invoice number seven we get all our list items here and this one's quite long it extends into the second page we're gonna turn on something in our document where we can have our headings appear on the second page and there's our signature as well let's let's close this out and let's just open up our word document again and if I highlight the column heading row here and go into my table design tab it's actually in the Layout tab sorry then there's this option here to repeat header rows let's click on that and now it's selected and save our document so mine saving right now and close it out and let's go back to flow and let's try that again so let's just use the previous run for our invoice number seven again and it ran successfully let's head over to our folder oops open up our invoice and save data this time around but this time we get our column headers appearing on the second page that's pretty cool so those are the two new Microsoft flow word connectors and you can use them to create PDF invoices pretty easily that have repeating content in them and also add signatures or other images dynamically if you liked this video make sure you hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to the channel that's it for this video see you in the next one