Basic workflows – sending an email when a form is submitted
As previously covered, Forms is a great application and one of the most underrated tools in the Microsoft 365 suite.
Straight out of the box, Forms allows you to receive an email notification each time a new response is submitted. However, this can only be sent to the user who created the form and cannot be sent to multiple people.
So, what can you do if multiple people need to be notified each time a form is submitted?
This requires a basic workflow to be set up in Power Automate.
You can do this either by creating a blank workflow or by using one of Power Automate’s pre-built templates. In this article we will walk through creating this workflow from blank to allow you to fully understand the process.
1. Navigate to Power Automate by clicking the App Launcher menu and selecting Power Automate
2. Click “+ Create” and choose “Automated Cloud Flow”
3. OPTIONAL to give your flow a name at this point. If you do not give it a name, Power Automate will automatically generate a name for your flow.
4. Now select your trigger – this means that when this action happens, your workflow will automatically start. For this workflow, our trigger will be “When a new response is submitted” in Microsoft Forms.
5. Then click “Create”
6. Now we select the form we want the workflow to run on
7. Then click “+ New step” and select Send an email
(TIP – you can search in the “Choose Operation” window to narrow down your results. See above I searched for “Email”)
8. Now we can enter multiple email addresses in the “To” field, fill in the subject line and Body of your email
9. Now click Save – and that’s it! You can test your flow by clicking “Test” in the top right-hand corner, navigating to your form and submitting a test response.
Creating from a template
Another way we can create this workflow is by using a template – to do this, navigate to Power Automate and click “Templates”. You can then type “Forms” in the search bar and select the template that most closely resembles what you are trying to achieve – in this case, the template closest to the above would be “Send an email to responder when response submitted in Microsoft
You can customise the workflow by selecting your form or deleting any actions not required.
You will also notice that this template has an extra step – “Get response Details” which will allow you to include the details of the Form response in the body of the email if required.
I recommend having a play with the Power Automate templates and pulling them apart to understand them and see how they work.
Feel free to reach out if you are just getting started with Power Automate. You can contact me here or on LinkedIn!