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Intro to Power Automate
It’s time folks! It’s time to automate your life, well, maybe not your life but we can automate some repetitive workflows and tasks. Power Automate is an awesome automation tool available to you via Microsoft’s Office 365 online, oh and there is a mobile app, and you can also configure it to work on the desktop. However, I won’t get into those specifics today. I just want to share with you what Power Automate is and what the online version can do for you now.
Question, are there tasks that you do on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis that could be automated? Can you think of tasks within your workflow that if automated meaning its automatically completed without much input from, saving you time and allowing you to focus on more pressing issues? I won’t accept any answer but yes because if we put our heads together, I’d be shocked if we couldn’t find one task in your workflow that can be automated.
What is Power Automate anyways?
Power Automate is an online workflow service that automates actions across the most common apps and services.
What can you do with Power Automate?
Power Automate can be used to automate workflows between your favorite applications and services, sync files, get notifications, collect data, and much more.
For example, you can automate these tasks:
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Instantly respond to high-priority notifications or emails.
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Copy all email attachments to your OneDrive for Business account.
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Automate approval workflows.
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Automate vacation approvals
Some Vocabulary:
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Power Automate: Microsoft’s workflow engine lets you build personal automated workflows using a wide range of services, without having to learn any code.
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Flow: The mechanism that does the automatic task. Every flow starts with a trigger.
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Triggers: A trigger is an event that will initiate the flow (or the workflow)
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Types of Triggers:
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When an email arrives in my mailbox
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When a file is created in my OneDrive
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When a new item is created in a SharePoint list
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When I tweet with a hashtag
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Actions: A trigger is followed by one or more actions. An action could be a query create, update, insert, or delete operation. The following are some examples of actions:
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Creating a new list item.
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Moving a file from OneDrive
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Sending an email notification
Types of flows
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Automated Flow – a type of flow which is activated when a pre-selected event occurs. An example is when a file is updated, other employees will receive a notification.
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Scheduled Flow – a flow which occurs at a specified time such as receiving an alert notifying everyone daily about an upcoming event.
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Button Flow – a flow triggered by the press of a button.
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Templates: Power Automate allows you to create your very own flow from scratch. However, as the saying goes “there is nothing new under the sun” because there are tons of templates to choose from, so you don’t have to create a flow from scratch. You can look through the templates to find what fits your automation needs.