Power Automate have simplified our tasks to a great extent. Requirements which would take few months previously are now accomplished in few weeks and weeks development may be in days.
And here is one such requirement I will discuss. The requirement is very simple. Convert HTML document to PDF. Basically if you have the following requirements, you are on the right blog.
- Print a HTML web page to PDF
- Convert word/ excel or any other document to PDF format
- HTML Text to PDF document
So let’s see how we can accomplish the same. While unknown to many, Power Automate’s OneDrive for Business connector have such actions which easily can perform these operations. So let’s get started.
I create an Instant Power Automate flow with manual trigger. Basically it can be a scheduled/ automated/ instant – any type of flow.
As a next step I use a variable to hold my HTML text. The HTML is basically a simple table containing information about couple of contacts. Below is the screenshot of the sample HTML output and the flow as of now.
It really does not matter how complex your HTML is. The construct remains the same.
In the next step, I go ahead with the creating the file. I use the ‘OneDrive for Business Connector‘ and use the ‘Create File‘ action.
As you can see in the above screenshot, I am saving the HTML content to a HTML file in Documents folder in one drive.
Now comes the important step. I use the ‘Convert File’ action to convert the HTML file and get the PDF content out of it.
The action is still in preview as of the time of writing this blog. But I don’t find any reason why this will not make it to final release.
And the final step is take the PDF content and use the “Create File” action again to save the content as PDF file.
And that will be all. In the Documents folder in the OneDrive, I can now see both the PDF and the HTML content saved.
And below is the content of the PDF file when I open it. Cool, isn’t it?
A quite complex requirement for yesteryears development but certainly simple with Power platform.