Best way to automate Outlook emails + PDF work orders into Excel? (n8n / Power Automate)
I’m trying to automate a workflow for a property maintenance company and could use some advice from people experienced with n8n/Power Automate.
Current workflow:
- Work orders come into Outlook emails
- Some details are in the email body
- Some are inside attached PDFs
- We need the data automatically entered into an - - - - Excel sheet used for scheduling
- The company already heavily relies on Excel, so switching databases right now isn’t ideal
We’ve been trying:
Outlook → AI Parsing → Excel
But we’re running into issues like:
- inconsistent email formats
- PDF extraction problems
- Excel append failures
- table/column mapping issues
- Outlook body content sometimes getting truncated
Questions:
- What’s the most reliable way to automate Outlook → Excel workflows for real-world messy emails?
- Is n8n or Power Automate better for this use case?
- How do you handle PDFs attached to Outlook emails?
- Is using AI extraction (OpenAI/Claude) the best approach, or is there a more stable method?
- Should we continue using Excel Online tables or move to something else long term?
- Has anyone built something similar for work orders/service businesses?
Would appreciate any architecture suggestions, best practices, or lessons learned.