How to Extract PDF Comments to a SharePoint List using Power Automate

The annotations and comments object in any PDF is easily accessible when we have the right tools at our disposal.

Using Power Automate, we can extract PDF annotations and comments directly into emails, messages, and even SharePoint lists using the Cloudmersive PDF and SharePoint connectors in conjunction with one another.

In this quick walkthrough, we’ll demonstrate the process of pulling annotations and comments from an example PDF (shown below) and placing those comments directly in SharePoint list multi-line text columns.

We’ll start by creating a manually triggered Instant cloud flow.

In our first step, we’ll use a Get file content action to pull the annotated PDF content from our system.

In this example, we’ll get the original PDF from a OneDrive for Business folder.

Next, we’ll find the Cloudmersive PDF connector and select the Get PDF annotations, including comments in the document action.

After we create our connection (this requires a free API key, which we can get by creating a free account on the Cloudmersive website), we’ll pass the File content value as an argument into the Input file parameter, and we’ll create a generic file name argument (like the one shown in the example below).

The Get PDF annotations action returns information from the annotations & comments in our PDF document as an array.

We’ll use the Create item action from the SharePoint connector to select the response content we want & create a list item with it.

In this example, we’ll pass the TextContents value as our Document Annotations argument, and we’ll pass the CreationDate as our Date Created argument. These parameters correspond to a very simple example list created for this demo.

In the final step of our flow, we’ll use an Add Attachment action from the SharePoint connector to attach the original PDF document to the new list item we just created.

We’ll now save and test our flow.

When our flow finishes running, we’ll find one new list item for each annotation found in our original PDF document.

Allowing our flow to create multiple list items works great for logging document annotations & comments in a tabular dataset (like Excel or CSV).

Note that we did not retrieve a Date Created value in this example. That’s because there wasn’t any information about the CreationDate stored in the original PDF. The Get PDF annotations action will only pull the information that PDF documents make available in their annotations & comments object.

Conclusion

In this example flow, we learned how to extract annotations and comments from a PDF document into a series of SharePoint list items. We used the Cloudmersive PDF connector in conjunction with OneDrive and SharePoint connectors to accomplish this.

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