Clone SharePoint List Items Effortlessly with Power Automate

Clone SharePoint List Item with Power Automate

Clone a SharePoint List Item with Power Automate

In case you want to update a list in SharePoint Online, in which the item to be inserted only differs, from what is already there, in just one field it would be much more effective if it were possible to copy the existing item and thus create a copy that we can change.

Currently, there is no simple way to duplicate or clone an item in a list using Microsoft SharePoint, so we would have to manually insert all the fields of the item we wanted to change.

In this article we will be able to create a workflow, through Power Automate so that, in just a few steps, it is possible to duplicate items and make the task of updating data and maintaining history, simpler.

Access Power Automate and create an “Instant flow”
Define a name for Flow and choose “For a selected item” as “Trigger”
Name your flow
Select the List name where you want to be able to clone an item
Select list
Click on “New step” and in the menu that appears, search for “Get item” in the Sharepoint connector
Insert the data from the list where we want to get all the information about an item and place triggerBody()?[‘entity’]?[‘ID’] in the Id field.
Click on “New step” and search for “Create item” in the Sharepoint connector
Insert the data from the list where we want to create the item (in this case it is the same). All content to be inserted comes dynamically from the “Get item” connector
Save and test

After publishing it you will see the Flow in the list, as shown below.

How to clone the item

To clone an item, simply:

Select the item to copy, click on “Automate”, wait a few seconds, our flow will appear and just click “Clone list item demo”.
Run flow
On the right side, a permission request will appear to connect to Sharepoint and then to execute the flow
Accept permissions
When updating the page we can see the item created from the selected one and now we can change the copy with the most recent data
cloned item
cloned item updated
For the identification of the versions, an expression was used that verifies the selected version and creates the next version to be changed and thus be able to have a history of changes.