Master 365: Getting Started with Power Automate (Premium)

Microsoft’s Power Automate platform helps you create automated workflows that react to events in multiple apps and services. Like Power Apps, Power Automate requires a Microsoft 365 commercial account, and it is available from the Microsoft 365 App launcher on the web.

Note: Power Automate used to be called Microsoft Flow, but it was rebranded to be more consistent with the other solutions in Microsoft’s Power Platform. But the workflows you create with Power Automate are still called flows.

Getting started is easy enough: The Power Automate website provides some good examples of the types of flows you may want to create---"Get a push notification when you receive an email from your boss,” for example, and “Save Office 365 email attachments to OneDrive for Business”---plus a nice selection of template collections.

So let’s start there. In the Productivity templates collection, I noticed that there are three templates for getting notified when a shared data source is modified, and that one of them---Send a customized email when a new SharePoint list item is added---is particularly timely because I just used a SharePoint list in my first Power App.

This template has three pieces---a Microsoft 365 user (me), Outlook, and SharePoint---and each is tied to my Microsoft 365 account. To create the flow, I just needed the URL of the SharePoint site that contains the list, and then the list name, which was automatically provided in a drop-down once I pasted in the site URL.

And that was that.

To test the flow, I ran the Cocktails app I made with Power Apps and inputted the details for a new cocktail, the Cuba Libre (a fancy name for rum and coke).

And sure enough, within less than 30 seconds, a new email appeared in my Outlook on the web inbox.

To be clear, items added to the Power Apps app are added to the original data source, that SharePoint list. And you can edit those items from that app, or from the SharePoint web interface. This is good to know because the original (and admittedly basic) app I created has a few formatting issues (for example, the ingredients and steps items need to support multiple lines but currently do not), so I can fix those things when needed (and update the app so it’s no longer an issue).

But with regards to Power Automate, I assume it’s obvious that this simple example is just the tip of the iceberg and that the possibilities here are literally almost limitless. It’s hard not to browse around the examples and templates that Microsoft provides and not be inspired to try your hand at your own automations, and there are far more sophisticated automations to be had.