Save Hours of Time – Automate your table creation in Dataverse

Data within Dataverse is stored within a set of tables, including a base set of standard tables that cover typical scenarios. But why stop there? With Dataverse, you can create custom tables specific to your organisation and automate this process. In this blog, I’ll cover two ways to automate this process and help you get the most out of your Dataverse experience.

Copilot

Although not perfect this is a really good tool to help get you going. In the video I show how I used it to start the creation of a table with just a description of what I wanted.

Navigate to https://make.powerapps.com/ > Tables and select ‘Describe the new table‘ to get going

Gotcha’s

• You can only add so many fields at once.
• Copilot decided some of the fields were inappropriate and didnt create them
• The tables created don’t form a solution, but can be added to one
• You’re not able to come back to a table and continue adding fields/columns using AI, you’ll need to go back into it and add them manually.

So to overcome this I went via the ‘Upload an excel file‘ route.

This is a handy tool, and to make it work even better I suggest adding a few rows of dummy data into you’re spreadsheet so that the correct column type can be allocated.

Another thing to consider is the use of lookup columns (to other tables within your environment) within your Excel template. Many tables have relationships (are linked to) other tables eg: Customers are linked to Tenancies. the creation of these relationships is often done via look ups. To overcome this I left them off the excel file I initially imported and added them manually once the new tables were in place.

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Original Post https://deliveringcrm.net/2024/01/31/save-hours-of-time-automate-your-table-creation-in-dataverse/