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Why does Power Automate Filter Query fail – column does not exist

Posted on December 18, 2022December 18, 2022 by Tom

“I’m trying to filter rows, but Power Automate keeps telling me that the column used in Filter Query doesn’t exist… why?“

“Column ‘My Column’ does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.“

“Could not find a property named ‘My Column’ on type ‘Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM.XXX’.”


Filtering is one of the most important concepts in Power Automate. Whenever possible you should use a filter to reduce the data the flow will work with. Your flows will be faster, easier to debug, and cheaper to run due to reduced API calls. Yet filters don’t really fall under the “no-code” approach as everything must be typed-in in the right format. Which leads us to the most common error you might see when creating a Filter Query – “Column xxx does not exist”.

Power Automate Filter Query column exist

Get the column name right

Whenever you work with columns, let it be in SharePoint or Dataverse, you should remember that they have two names. One name that you see and which you can edit, another one on the background that’s assigned during creation. Filter Query always wants the background one, the one extracted from the column settings in SharePoint or Dataverse.

But there’s also another way to get this name – from the actions output JSON. If you keep both the actions – ‘Get items’ and ‘List rows’ without filters and run the flow, they’ll give you a JSON will all the columns. And since they also use the internal names, you just have to find the column in the output.

For example, I want to get only the rows where a lookup column contains a specific value – LookupValue1.

Firstly, I’ll run the ‘List rows’ action without any filters. I’ll get the result below that contains among others also the lookup column value.

Power Automate Filter Query column exist

Now I know what to search for. I know the property name – cr09b_lookupvaluesearch – and the property value to look for – LookupValue1. Everything that’s needed to build the Filter Query. Type it in and get only the rows with the desired value.

Summary

If you’re getting the ‘column does not exist’ error while trying to use the Filter Query in Power Automate, you’re probably using a wrong column name. Power Automate always needs the name on the background – internal name for SharePoint columns or logical name for Dataverse columns. No spaces, no special characters, just a single string.

There’re multiple ways to get them, but the easiest one is probably directly from the flow. Run the action, check the outputs, and copy the column name from there.


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Do you struggle with the various expressions, conditions, filters, or HTTP requests available in Power Automate?

I send one email per week with a summary of the new solutions, designed to help even non IT people to automate some of their repetitive tasks.

All subscribers have also access to resources like a SharePoint Filter Query cheat sheet or Date expressions cheat sheet.

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Hello and welcome!

My name is Tom and I'm a business process automation consultant and Microsoft MVP living in the Czech Republic. I’ve been working with Microsoft technologies for almost 10 years, currently using mainly Power Automate, SharePoint, Teams, and the other M365 tools.

I believe that everyone can automate part of their work with the Power Automate platform. You can achieve a lot by "clicking" the flows in the designer, but you can achieve much more if you add a bit of coding knowledge. And that's what this blog is about.

To make the step from no-code Power Automate flows to low-code flows: using basic coding knowledge to build more complex yet more efficient flows to automate more of your daily tasks.

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