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Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful automation tool that allows you to streamline your business processes, giving you more free time to tackle the big ideas in your business.
Formally known as Microsoft Flow, Power Automate is used to create ‘workflows’. These workflows begin with a ‘trigger’, which kicks off a series of steps to respond to the trigger.
Power Automate can be connected to a wide range of web services including Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce, Slack, Twitter, DocuSign, and GitHub. This means there are dozens of Microsoft Power Automate examples.
Here are 9 that will help you get started…
1. Back Up Email Attachments
Backing up your data is essential for critical documents, and a misplaced document could cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars.
It is also important that these backups are stored in a logical place.
However, sorting out all of your email attachments into a tidy backup area can be difficult and time-consuming. Microsoft Power Automate can be used to help.
When you create a workflow, you can connect Office 365 Outlook with OneDrive For Business. If you use another cloud storage system such as Google Drive or Dropbox, then it can be substituted for OneDrive. With the two connected in a workflow, you can instruct it to save all email attachments into a single folder.
To get even more organized, you can create folders within your main backup folders. You can then save email attachments into each of these folders depending on who they came from.
This can be a great way to split up documents from coworkers, the human resources department, management, and your own clients.
2. Send Planner Tasks In Microsoft Teams
If your team makes heavy use of Microsoft Teams to organize and discuss their work, then connecting it to Planner might receive a warm welcome. This Microsoft Power Automate example is actually so well received that it has been recommended by the Microsoft team.
Within the workflow, you can choose the team and channel that the message is posted to. You can also customize the specific message that is sent by including information such as the title, due date, and the person in the team who created the task.
3. Monitor Brand Sentiment and Send Data To Specific Departments
When you release a new product or make changes to a brand, you will want to keep track of how customers are reacting to the changes.
Twitter has been a focal point for monitoring customer behavior for over a decade, and with a single Power Automate template you can automate some of these tasks.
Within your workflow, connect Twitter and Power BI (provided for free in many Microsoft enterprise packages). With this template, you can select a particular keyword, and then the sentiment for that keyword will be monitored on Twitter.
Within Power BI you will have a dataset containing the time of the tweet, the contents of the tweet, and the sentiment. This can be used by your marketing or data teams to understand how well the keyword is doing.
4. Get A Daily Summary of Planner Tasks
We have already used Planner to send out new tasks to our team, but we can also use Planner to send out daily emails of our tasks – as seen in this Microsoft Power Automate example.
Microsoft Power Automate can perform recurrent tasks, which means that a workflow can be automated to happen every hour, day, or week.
By using recurrence as your trigger, you can send an email with Office 365 Outlook by pulling the tasks from each bucket in Planner. Your daily email can be customized to split tasks by bucket (or due date), or by only showing tasks in certain buckets.
5. Send Form Responses for Approval
When creating workflows, you are not limited to only connecting two services. This example, which allows you to start an approval process when somebody completes a form, makes use of Microsoft Forms, Approval, SharePoint, Users, and Office 365 Outlook.
The popular automated example, which has been used over 100,000 times, can be great for managing approval processes for internal resources in your business.
For example, you can create a form for booking a meeting room. Employees can then fill in the form to request the use of the meeting room. If approved, the request will be recorded as a SharePoint item and the employee who made the request will receive an email.
6. Build Emails for Clients and Customers
There are times when you might want to send a single email to some of your customers or clients. You might want to inform a handful of your clients that you are offering a promotion that could suit their needs, or that you are going to be out of the office over the next week and that they should contact a coworker if they need help.
Anyone who has worked in business for a long time knows that your clients will be much happier if the email is also customized to them, instead of receiving a generic promotion or apology email.
The Microsoft Power Automate team provides free template examples that will help you to connect Microsoft Excel and Office 365 Outlook, allowing you to quickly send emails to clients.
The Excel data must live in a table for this template to work. The flow can then be triggered by selecting the row in the Excel table, going to the Data tab, and then selecting the workflow.
If you populate your Excel table with some information such as emails, names, and business names, you can use this template to create a personalized email.
You can then send the email to a subset of your client base with ease.
7. Block Out Your Calendar For An Hour
While Power Automate can be used to create complex automated tasks, it can also be used to create simple buttons – such as this button that blocks out your Outlook.com calendar for an hour.
This instant reaction will have the most benefit for busy individuals who have a lot of spontaneous meetings.
If you have an urgent meeting, you can click on a button within Outlook that has been created by the workflow, and then your calendar will be blocked for the next 60 minutes.
The workflow can also be customized to change the amount of time for which the calendar is blocked. So if you know your meetings only last 15 minutes, you can modify the template to take that into account.
8. Save Contracts Into A SharePoint Folder
If you use an electronic signing platform such as GetAccept or DocuSign on a regular basis, you might be annoyed by having to regularly download signed contracts.
Having the contracts appear in your workspace automatically could save a lot of time, and make it easier to send to others in your organization.
By connecting your GetAccept or DocuSign account with these Microsoft Power Automate examples, you can save signed documents into a SharePoint folder.
While the template is based upon GetAccept, it can easily be modified to work with any electronic sharing platform. Providing the platform has an API, it can be swapped out for GetAccept with no issues. If you are unsure whether there is an appropriate API, get in touch with your electronic signing platform.
9. Populate Spreadsheets with Email Contents
If you have several Power Automate workflows set up already, you might now be receiving daily emails. This could be daily tasks to complete, daily stock prices and portfolio values, or team approvals.
With one more Power Automate example, you can populate an Excel spreadsheet with the contents of an email. If, for example, you have a daily example that tells you a portfolio value, you can create a spreadsheet that keeps track of the daily value over a long period of time.
By making use of other Excel tricks such as VLOOKUP, you can create a readable dashboard in Excel that updates daily from your emails.
We have covered nine different Microsoft Power Automate examples. With these, you can draw inspiration to start creating your own workflows and join data from 100s of different data sources. The possibilities with Microsoft Power Automate are almost endless!
Originally published Apr 12 2021
