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Getting Started with PowerAutomate

This series is for new PowerAutomate users. Learn the basics and start building!

What Are Power Automate Solutions?

Learning Power Automate is a journey. First, you learn about dynamic content, triggers, and actions. Then, you build a few cloud flows. You’ll eventually reach a point when the process you are automating requires more than one trigger or the process needs to go thru a formal development cycle, moving thru multiple environments (QA, UAT, PRD). This is when you need to learn about Power Automate solutions. Read on to learn more.

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Make Finding the Name of Day or Month in Power Automate Easy!

Earlier this week, I wrote about working with date and time in Power Automate. I explained how to use 4 functions to return the month and year from the current date. But, the values come back as numbers. What if you want the name of the day of the week or the month, like Monday or January? Returning names in Power Automate takes different expressions and the use of arrays, but it’s easy! Read on to learn how and leave a comment explaining how you’ve used arrays in Power Automate.

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4 Functions to Simplify Date & Time in Power Automate

My most recent Power Automate builds have included a lot of work with date and time data. I thought this would be an excellent addition to the Getting Started with Power Automate series I started a few months ago. This is also a great starting place to learn about expressions. Read on to learn more about four functions that will help simplify working with date and time in Power Automate.

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What Can Power Automate Do On Mobile?

My Learning Power Automate series is coming to a close, and the last thing we are investigating is the power of Power Automate on mobile. I was searching the Templates section of Power Automate for inspiration, and I found a template with a manual trigger to send a notice to your coworkers that you were out sick. So, you might wake up one morning and feel like death. All you have to do is grab your phone, make a few clicks, and you can go back to sleep. That’s pretty cool right? Well, I made it even better with a few tweaks. Read on to learn more about Power Automate on mobile.

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How to Find Planner IDs for Power Automate

Power Automate integrates really well with other Microsoft applications like Teams, SharePoint, and Planner. Most actions involving these applications use drop-down lists where you can choose from a list of SharePoint sites or Teams. But, the drop-down list is NOT a list of all the Teams/SharePoint sites/Plans that you have access to. So what do you do when what you need isn’t in the drop-down list? In a prior post, I explained how to find the necessary ID for SharePoint. This post shows how to find Planner IDs to reference a specific Plan in Power Automate.

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How to Understand Code in Power Automate

I’m working on bringing self-service automation to my company with Power Automate. Next week, we learn about processing email. To this point, I’ve avoided talking about code. I’ve stuck to dynamic content and things you can build with the user interface. But, to process email, we need to talk about code. So, if you’ve ever been confused by what you see when you click on the Click to download or Show raw inputs links, this post is for you. It will provide that foundational knowledge to work with code in Power Automate.

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How to Update Excel with Power Automate

I’m currently helping to deploy Power Automate as a self-service automation tool. As part of that effort, I’ve been hosting weekly half an hour webinars where we build sample flows. So far we’ve worked with triggers and actions from Teams, Office 365 Outlook, Forms, SharePoint, Approvals, Excel Online, and User 365. And when you understand a little bit of the underlying architecture, these applications work together so well in Power Automate. But, there is almost always a little bit of extra context or explanation required. Earlier this week, I posted a write-up of the things you need to know for building flows with Forms. And now, I’m going to dive into what you need to know to update Excel with Power Automate.

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Working with Microsoft Forms in Power Automate

This week I’m showing users how to build a Power Automate flow using Microsoft Forms. The flow triggers when a form submission is received. However, there’s more than one way to create a form, and there’s quite a lot you need to know about forms before building in Power Automate, so I’m dedicating a post just to help users with Microsoft Forms. Read on to learn more.

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SharePoint Site Missing in Power Automate

I’ve been doing a lot of Power Automate training lately, and I always ask one of the new users to drive so that I don’t go thru the demo too quickly. This is a great idea if everything goes smoothly. Spoiler….everything did not go smoothly. The Microsoft Team/SharePoint site that we needed to work with did not exist in the user’s drop-down list in the action. Not only did it not exist for my demo user. It didn’t exist for a lot of people, so this was a big problem. There is an easy fix though! Read on to learn how to fix this issue.

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