The time saving possibilities of Power Automate
Previously known as Flow, Power Automate is Microsoft’s process automation tool. This can mean automating simple business processes such as leave requests and approvals or complicated processes that span multiple applications such as employee onboarding.
It works by quickly stitching together triggers and actions – for example when something happens in my email (i.e., receiving a report), go and make something happen in SharePoint (i.e., input some data into a SharePoint list). You can also add in conditions or “if” statements that can change which action is used based on whether or not a condition is met – for example if a leave request is approved, add it to a calendar, if the request is rejected then send a rejection email to the requestor.
It’s part of the Microsoft 365 Suite of applications and is included in most subscription packages, so is definitely worth having a play around with. Although it’s not super beginner-friendly, Power Automate has lots of templates for popular automations that can make creating your first automation much less daunting.
You can search within the templates for a specific application – e.g., searching for “SharePoint” will show you all the templates that contain SharePoint, or you can search by a trigger such as “When a file is added” or “When an item changes”. These templates can be customised to suit your specific needs, so I encourage you to have a look at some templates, pull them apart and see how they work.
There are also different types of flows to choose from – automated, scheduled, or instant.
Automated
Automated flows run when an event triggers the flow to run. For example, when an email is received.
Scheduled
Scheduled flows don’t have triggers – they run on a schedule that you can define e.g. every morning at 10am.
Instant
Instant flows also don’t have triggers – they run manually on demand such as clicking a flow button.
I’ll dive into Power Automate a bit deeper in another blog and will show you some simple workflows to get you going. But as you can see, Power Automate can easily automate mundane processes and reduce errors associated with manual processes.