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Power Automate HTML Table Styling and Formatting

by 18 Comments

The Create HTML Table action in Power Automate is a useful tool, but lacks any formatting or styling options. In this post I am going to explain how to format the HTML table produced by Power Automate. Here is an example of the default output:

Image of the default unformatted output of the Create HTML Table action in Microsoft Power Automate

In my opinion:

  • The table is just ugly.
  • There are no column alignment options.
  • If you are using custom columns, it does not allow you to put spaces in the column headers.

The good news is that the Create HTML Table action produces basic HTML that can be easily modified or styled. The HTML source of the table generated above by Power Automate above is:

<table>
   <thead>
      <tr>
         <th>FirstName</th>
         <th>LastName</th>
         <th>JobDescription</th>
         <th>Furloughed</th>
         <th>FurlougedDate</th>
      </tr>
   </thead>
   <tbody>
      <tr>
         <td>Paul</td>
         <td>Murana</td>
         <td>Power Automate Developer</td>
         <td>No</td>
         <td></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
         <td>Micheal</td>
         <td>Knight</td>
         <td>Lone Ranger</td>
         <td>Yes</td>
         <td>1986-04-04</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
         <td>Peter</td>
         <td>Venkman</td>
         <td>Ghost Hunter</td>
         <td>No</td>
         <td></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
         <td>John</td>
         <td>Rambo</td>
         <td>Mercenary</td>
         <td>No</td>
         <td></td>
      </tr>
   </tbody>
</table>

Use CSS to create a much more attractive table

By adding some CSS, you can make the table much more attractive very quickly:

Image of an HTML Table from Flow which has had styling applied.

The simple CSS I applied to the above is:

<style>
Table {
  font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  background-color: #EEEEEE;
  border-collapse: collapse;
  width: 100%;
}

Table td, Table th {
  border: 1px solid #ddd;
  padding: 3px 3px;
}

Table th {
  font-size: 15px;
  font-weight: bold;
  padding-top: 12px;
  padding-bottom: 12px;
  text-align: left;
  background-color: #1C6EA4;
  color: white;
}
</style>

If you aren’t a CSS wizard you can use https://divtable.com/table-styler/ to get you started.

So now you have got the CSS, here is how to add it to the table:

  • Create a compose step called CSS Table Style.
  • Paste your CSS into that compose action.
  • In your Send an email action paste the CSS and then the HTML Table:
    Image showing how to insert CSS Into a HTML Table generated by Power Automate

You can put anything else you need in the body, but I would suggest that you put the CSS before anything else.

Add spaces to the column headings

In my example, I used custom columns and I was unable to add spaces to the column headings. So here is my workaround:

  • Use a carat ^ symbol wherever you want a space in the column header.
  • Create a compose action to replace the carat with a space.
  • Select the output of the compose in your email instead of your HTML Table output:
Image showing how to add spaces to column headers in the Power Automate Create HTML Table action.

The compose expression is:

replace(body('Create_HTML_table'), '^', ' ')

You could of course use any symbol, but make sure to use one that isn’t going to be in use elsewhere in the table. The carats are replaced with spaces:

Image of a HTML Table produced by Power Automate with CSS style applied.

You can take this much further by not using the Create HTML Table action at all, and constructing your own table directly in Power Automate and looping through an array of records. This is something I do sometimes, but it is a lot more work and I wanted to quickly cover how to improve the look of the standard action.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Alek says

    This is great! However, it removes all the line breaks where there are multiple paragraphs in a field. Any solution to that?

  2. Paulie says

    Hi Alek,
    Yes, this is quite normal. Newline characters are not automatically converted to HTML line breaks. But you could add a compose step to do this for you, something like:

    replace(body('Create_HTML_table'), decodeUriComponent('%0A'), '<br>')

    Will replace newlines with a HTML break.

  3. Alek says

    Thank you Paulie! For anyone reading this in the future, if you want to both replace the line breaks with html breaks AND the carrots with spaces, use:

    replace(replace(body(‘Create_HTML_table’), decodeUriComponent(‘%0A’), ”),’^’, ‘ ‘)

  5. Paul says

    This was very helpful. Thank you.
    I have nice formatted tables now but they only work for my outlook recipients. Gmail strips css blocks from incoming emails. It seems that making this would would require inline css. IE styles inside the table’s etc.

    Have you found a way around this?

  7. Abhinow Kumar says

    To add spaces in headings, you can simple enter the text in notepad. Copy text with space from notepad and paste in table header.

  9. Ulf Werner says

    Great instruction…….. i tried to use selector to for example make the background color of the thrid column differ to the other columns. Seems that the selector ist not working. Do you have any workaround for it?

  11. tjolivet says

    This isn’t working for me…is it because I have a prior Compose action that formats the HTML table color, font, and borders?

  13. Omprakash says

    Thanks, guys. Great work.
    I have another issue, i use carriage return within excel cell for multiple items. The compose section output shows a proper line breaks for list items within a cell. However, in the email body, the list items are converted into a paragraph. Is there a work around this.
    Keep up your good work! Cheers!

  15. Mercedes Lozano says

    My standard reply e-mail footer gets changed as well in a ugly way… How to avoid this?

  16. Andrea says

    For some reason, when I do this, it leaves the ugly table in the email. Am I missing a step to “replace” the formatting in the Create HTML table step?

  17. Andrea says

    Figured it out 2 mins after posting my last question. : ) I had the create html table output listed in the CSS table style compose step. : )

  18. Gene Rice says

    Is this possible if I need to Nest tables?
    What if I need to span a column over multiple rows?

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