What is Power Automate? – An Overview

Hi there dear readers! Today, we will talk about Microsoft’s Power Automate (formerly called Flow). Power Automate is a member of Microsoft’s Power Platform family, and allows you to automate your business processes and design them with as little code as possible. It integrates with nearly 300 connectors and handles your work automatically without the need to visit multiple sites or run multiple programs. To begin with, I recommend reading this article and then looking at the templates on Power Automate’s site. These are ready-made templates that you can get started with right away. Here I leave a few of them for you to review:

POWER AUTOMATE FOR EVERYONE

One of the best parts of Power Automate is that you can perform a variety of business processes in the simplest level possible, even without having the tiniest idea of how to code. Of course, every now and then you will need formulas here as well when appropriate, And for that kind of situations, Power Automate has its own formulas. Many of these formulas, referred to as “Expressions”, are similar to those of Excel.

FUNDAMENTAL COMPONENTS

Flows have 2 main components:

  1. Trigger
  2. Action

The main question when it comes to the trigger title would be “What will be required to happen for this flow to run?”

The titles like:

  • When an e-mail is received,
  • At 10 o’clock every day,
  • When a new task is created,
  • When a new line is added to the Sharepoint list,
  • When a button (Power Automate button, Power Apps button, Power BI button) is pushed,

etc. are all triggers. A flow doesn’t work without a trigger.

The main question when it comes to the action title would be “Which actions will be executed once this flow starts running?”

Here, we will select the actions we want to execute and connect them one after the other.

  • Send an e-mail.
  • Create a task.
  • Send a message on Teams.
  • Add a new record to the Sharepoint list.
  • Create a new file on Sharepoint.

etc. are all actions.

As a matter of fact, most of our business processes depend on various conditions and approvals. For example, you will save the files to a folder, but your administrator must approve these files first. Here the process gets a little more complicated and you have to apply various conditions to the processes as well. Since these situations are quite normal, Power Automate also has a solution for this situation: Flows can be designed to create special reactions to the results of certain conditions by selecting conditions as an action and working according to these conditions.

Everything goes step-by-step in the Power Automate flow. Thus, one of the main points to know here is that when you add an action, you can use the outputs of the actions or triggers from the previous steps. In the Dynamic Content area, Power Automate already shows you what and which titles you can use.

 

Below you can see an image of a conditional process.

The steps here are as follows:

  1. We have created a survey, and we want this flow to be triggered when a new answer comes in.
  2. We get the details of the answer that caused the trigger.
  3. In the survey, we’ve got the question of: “Did you like our event?”. We will execute 2 different actions depending on the answer to this question. For this very reason, we add a condition.
  4. We choose the title to which we will apply the condition: “Did you like our event?”. We want it to check if the answer here is equal to 5. 5 is the highest value.
  5. If it is equal to 5, then we send an e-mail to the sender saying “Thanks”.

 

You can click here to check out our other articles about Power Automate. And if you ever have a question, feel free to let us know. See you in other articles.

Good game, well played.

Power Apps and Power Automate 2020 License Updates

Power Platform

We have been waiting for the work flow product we knew as Ms Flow to get the Power title like Power BI and Power Apps for a long time. It recently joined the Power Platform family with the name of Power Automate (Flow) as expected.

Power Apps and Power Automate (Flow) is a team that increases efficiency and speeds up the work right from the beginning. While end users are working on their Power Apps mobile apps, Power Automate quietly sustains the work flow and verification process in the background.

You can click here for the articles about Power Automate.

Can I use Power Platform for free?

If you have any type of Office365 license, yes!

If you have one of the Office365 licenses below, you can use the Power Platform products for free.

2020 Licensing Updates for Power Apps and Power Automate

The increase of Premium connectors and features was foreshadowing the licensing changes that would happen in Flow.

With the Flow joining the Power family, Power Apps & Power Automate came to the top of the agenda.

If you don’t have Office 365

With the licensing method based on layered quote becoming definite, the prices are still valid since December 1, 2019.

You can use Power Apps and Power Automate as Add-on with monthly payment.

Licensing is separated into two ways: based on the number of users or based on the number of applications you will use.

1st Payment Model

To use 2 mobile apps as Company/Person

It is priced as 56 TLs (in Turkey) per user and the costs increase as the application number increases.

 

2nd Payment Model

To use limitless number of mobile apps as Company/Person

It is priced as 224,20 TLs (in Turkey) per user and there are no extra costs.

Take a look at here for details.

 

Take a look at here for the document about licensing.

Shape Power Automate Flows Based On Forms Responses

We mentioned that it is possible to securely collect data in electronic environment with MS Forms. The automatic workflows are done with Power Automate flows.

In this article, we will create a flow that will be shaped based on the choices of the user by adding the Choose Action question.

If the user chooses Send Form to Approval, the Approval process is going to start. In the other case, only an info e-mail will be send.

After you add the Choose Action question to the Form, you can start the actions with a blank flow by switching to Power Automate.

Power Automate

While creating all flows, a trigger is created in the first step. Trigger is a required step for the flow to start working and it is important to specify it correctly. The flow we will create in this article will work when the Form is responded. So, the flow will be triggered every time the form is responded and will start to work. Add the When a new response is submitted trigger.  It is specified from the list of which poll is going to cause the flow to start when responded.

In the next step, we will look at the responses of the poll. Add the Get Response Details step to access the responses.

Choose the name of the poll in the Form Identity field. Choose Response Notifications List Response Identity for the Response Identity.

This step enabled us to access all question fields. This way, we can get the response of the Choose Action question.

In the new step, add Condition to test the response. Add the Choose Action question to the left with dynamic content.

And on the right, one of the responses will be written. Since we will be controlling a String, we will be using the String function.

It will be checked if the response given with the String(‘Send Form to Approval’) expression is equal to this value.

Add Approval to the Yes field of the Condition and Send an E-mail to the No field, and complete the process.

The approval mails can be sent to the person who has created the request (to the person who sent the form to approval) based on Approved/Denied condition.

Click here to read the other Power Automate articles.

New Products on Power Platform

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents, the system where you can create your own ChatBot!

With Power Virtual Agents, you can create a learning chatbot structure.

A system where you decide the questions and answers. The way it works lets you start the flow with Power Automate and is very prone to be developed.

 

You can create custom workflows with Power Automate within the Power Virtual Agent, or work in an integrated manner with the products and services with the help of hundreds of conductors by creating complex scenarios with Microsoft Bot Framework.

Evaluate Performance
You can track the bot’s performance and always make improvements by using the AI and data-based analysis on the dashboard.

Click here for detailed information.

Using the Table Format on Power Platform

When you get data from Excel to products like Power Apps and Power BI, you need to use this data in the table format. If there is a table in the Excel from which you’ll get the data,  it can be directly transferred to the system.
Even if the data is in an Excel on OneDrive, the situation is still the same. Data field should be formatted as Table.

Power Automate (MS Flow) – Excel Connection (OneDrive)

Power Apps – Excel Connection (OneDrive)

Using the Table Format

You can turn the existing data into a table by choosing Table in the Insert tab or in an Excel worksheet or you can start by inserting a new table. (The shortcut for creating a table in Excel is CTRL+L)


When you turn the data into a Table, it will be named as Table1. Every table you add to existing Excel will be named Table2, Table3 etc. When there are multiple tables, names are going to be confusing. In order not to be confused, you should rename all the tables in a meaningful way in Excel.

Defining Names

All table names in Power Apps data sources are displayed the way below and the same names are used in formulas. For this reason, the tables should be named before being connected to the platforms.

Excel Name Manager

View the existing tables from Formulas –>Name Manager. Click Edit–> Name and define and give a new name. The named table can be used in any platform that you want.

You can take a look at the details of creating and renaming a table.

You can click here to access the other Power Apps articles.

Send E-Mails with Attachments Weekly with Power Automate

Do you send the latest version of the excel file on which you work with your team to your manager? Spare 10 minutes of your time now and create your own flow with Power Automate and send your e-mails with Excel attachments to your manager automatically every week at any hour your want.

When you want to create a flow, you start off with an action (trigger). The flow we will create needs to be run automatically every week, so we will start the flow with the Recurrence(Schedule) trigger.
*If you want, you can do monthly, daily, hourly controls.

In the next step, we need to indicate the location of the file that we want to send as an attachment to the flow. Thus, we need to add the related connector (for example: OneDrive) to the action flow. This way, the file we want to send with mail attachment will be accessed.

Actions are very short and simple. You can follow the steps below and create the flow quickly.

Power Automate Steps

  • Recurrence(Schedule) -> For weekly control
  • OneDrive(Get File Content)->
  • (List Files in Folder)-> To get the data there
  • To be able to choose the one we want among the files we have called Add Condition- > (We get the control of the file we want to call by writing [Name without Extension=ExcelName] through Name without Extension.
  • This action brings the apply to each command to the screen automatically ->
    Power Automate Uygulama Adımları 
  • If the condition is met, to send the mail: we need to add the content coming from OneDrive to the attachments content field in the Advanced Options in Outlook (Send an e-mail). Also, we need to fill in the attachments name field.
    mail atma işlemi

You can send the latest version of your Excel file in Outlook mail attachment with Recurrence(Schedule) control every week by following the steps above.

Send Mass E-mails with Power Automate

You can send the mails with custom subject and content in which you address people specially in cases like congratulating, events, special day celebrations. This is something that especially the HR needs.

This way, you don’t deal with sending mails one by one. You only need to indicate the mail list and details.

Create a Table

Open en Excel in OneDrive. Add a Table from the Insert tab.

Write Mail, Name Surname and mail details into the columns of this table like below.

Each row of this table will be sent as separate e-mails by the flow.

Flow Process with Power Automate

Start a new blank flow.

After the data in the table is filled, flow will be run by being triggered individually. For this reason, start the flow with Manually trigger a flow.

In the next step, add Excel for Business (List rows present in a table) to be able to add the data in the Excel table. Add the table you’ve just created into this item.

In the next step, add Outlook (Send an e-mail).

In this step, the columns of the Excel table is added to the related fields. With you choosing the Excel fields (mail, name, etc.) the Apply to each item will be added to the flow automatically. An event will be created for each row in the Excel file thanks to the Apply to each item.

 

After filling the related fields, name the flow on top left corner. For example: Send Mails to a Certain List. You can save and close the flow on top right corner.

You can verify the data in the Excel table and run the flow.

You can take a look at here for the Power Automate Outlook Connector.

Send the File added to OneDrive in Mail Attachment

Hello! In this article, we will be sending the file added to OneDrive in mail attachments. Of course, as you might have guessed, we will be using Power Automate.

Before we start the flow, there are some files we need to create on OneDrive.

OneDrive for Business

Go to OneDrive–> New–>Folder and create a folder named Mail Folder.

Create another folder named Attachments in the Mail Folder. We will add the mail attachments into this folder.

OneDrıve'a Eklenen Dosyayı oluşturma

Now we can move on to Power Automate.

Power Automate

Go My flows –>New–> Automated- from blank and create the process with a blank flow.

Power Automate

You don’t have to choose anything in the window that opens up. You can skip to the flow window directly with the Skip button.

Atla (Skip) butonu

Flow Actions

Our flow will run when the file added to OneDrive is added. So, we start by choosing OneDrive for Business –> When a file is created (properties only).
When a file is created (properties only)
contains details like the name and root of the file that has been added to Drive.

Akış İşlemleri

After adding this item, we will indicate the file into which attachments will be uploaded.

Choose Root–>Mail Folder–> Attachments.

Dosya yolu seçim alanı

In the new step, we add the Get File Content item to use the file added to the folder in a tangible way.

We need to give the unique identifier info to this item to detect the file that has been added to the folder.

Click Add dynamic content and choose List of Files Id.

Dinamik içerik ekle

In the next step, add the Send an Email(V2) item.

In this item:

To: The mail address of the person you’ll send the mail to.

Subject: Mail’s subject (optional)

Body: Mail content (optional)

Open mail sending details with Show advanced options that is located on left bottom corner to add the mails to the flow.

Add File Attachments to the Mail

Choose Attachments name: List of Files Name.

File Content that has been gotten with the Attachments Content: Get File Content object is added to this field.

Maıle Dosya Eklerini Ekleyin

And the flow is complete.

You can name the flow on top left corners and then save it by clicking the save button on top right corner.

Now when you add any file into the Attachments folder, it will be sent as an e-mail with attachment automatically.

You can click here for the other Power Apps articles.

Send Calendar to a Guest List with Power Automate

You can send meeting calendars with customized data like addressing each person, event content and location for all your event invitations through Power Automate.

This way, you don’t have to deal with creating calendars one by one. You only need to indicate the guest list and event details.

Create a Table

Open en Excel in OneDrive. Add a Table from the Insert tab.

Write Mail, Name Surname and mail details into the columns of this table like below.

For each row of this table, e-mails will be sent separately by the flow.

The event date and hour was written as 2020-03-23T13:00:00 in order for it to be in the format Power Automate expects. The time format is 24-hours and the event will be created for the exact hour you determine.

Flow Process with Power Automate

Start a new blank flow.

After the data in the table is filled, flow will be run by being triggered individually. For this reason, start the flow with Manually trigger a flow.

In the next step, add Excel for Business (List rows present in a table) to be able to add the data in the Excel table. Add the table you’ve just created into this item.

In the next step, add Outlook (Send an e-mail).

In this step, the columns of the Excel table is added to the related fields. With you choosing the Excel fields (mail, name, etc.) the Apply to each item will be added to the flow automatically. An event will be created for each row in the Excel file thanks to the Apply to each item.

 

After filling the related fields, name the flow on top left corner. For example: Send Mails to a Certain List. You can save and close the flow on top right corner.

You can verify the data in the Excel table and run the flow.

 

You can take a look at this link for the Power Automate Outlook Connector.

Tag Channels and People in Teams with Power Automate

That mysterious topic everybody curiously searches in google and gets lost between tabs! We will look at how to automatically share posts with tagging channels and people in Microsoft Teams with Power Automate.

This is how our main question was born:

“HR departments shouldn’t spend half of their work day looking for who’s birthday it is and sending them e-mails, we use Teams as a communication platform within our company. Let’s create a system that can automatically create a birthday post. It can notify everyone and celebrate that person’s birthday.”

Power Automate is the name of Microsoft’s product that was known as Flow before. For this reason, when you are searching “power automate”, you can see the name of “Flow” in most of the websites you visit. Power automate is a workflow product that can work integrated with 200-250 products and you can transfer, write, read and create between these products. You can send your unfinished tasks to yourself every morning at 9 am and create flows integrated with a lot of products like creating tasks depending on the results of the poll you’ve sent.

Now, if we go back to our main problem, here is what we need to do:

  • We will create a data source that contains birthdays and e-mail addresses.
  • We will check the data to see if the birthday is today or not.
  • For those who have their birthdays today, we will choose a channel on Microsoft Teams, mention the person and channel; and thus, notify everyone.
  • We need the system to repeat this everyday.

Let’s move step by step. First, go to Power Automate’s website and create a new flow.

1-CHOOSING THE TRIGGER

A trigger is what you need the most to start a flow. The question should be: “When do I want this flow to start running?” We will use “Recurrence” in this flow. After we choose the trigger, we enter information concerning when it will start running. We chose 10 am every morning for this flow.

power automate ile teams de mention için yineleme triggeri gif

2- Connection to the data source that contains birthdays and personal information

We will use SQL as data source here. If you want, you can you Excel. I need to mention something very important before we start; when you want to change the data source, you have to create the flow from the beginning. Because we will control and make actions using this source. The action we choose is the “Get rows” action. This way, it will be able to check for all in the table.

sql bağlantısı

3- The “Is their birthday today?” control

For this control, we choose condition. In this condition there will be two pieces: the first one will check the birthday piece (is it the same day of the month?), the second one will check the month (is it the same month?). Now we will write an expression into the “Choose a value” section.

power automate kosul ekleme

I left an image below so that it is not hard for you to follow conditions. You can find the code version of one below as well. We use the formatDateTime function to get the day parts of date expressions on the first row. And we use the utcNow function to see if they match up with today or not. The ‘dd’ and ‘MM’ expressions next to them represent date and month respectively. When you add these expressions it will include it to the “Apply to each” step. The items(‘Apply_to_each’) step in the formulas comes from here. [‘Birthday’] is the name of the row in which the birthdays are stored in our data source.

PS: We have to use the ‘MM’ expression in capital like this or it doesn’t get detected, we didn’t type it incorrectly.

kosullar

formatDateTime(items('Apply_to_each')?['Birthday'],'dd')

4- TAGGING IN TEAMS

And now let’s come to the main topic! After we do the steps below, the important thing is to share the post of the birthday. In this step, first, we need to choose in which group and channel the post will be shared and get the id of the group&channel. After choosing the said group and channel, you can get their ID fields with Power Automate. There are two actions for that: Get Groups, Get Teams Channels. You can find the IDs on their outputs by running these requests.

power automate list channel

Write the ids you got into its place in this address:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teams/TEAM_ID/channels/CHANNEL_ID/messages

We will send a request to graph.microsoft.com  in order to use this feature about Teams. Microsoft Graph is a developer platform that connects multiple devices and services to each other.

The action we will use to tag and mention in Teams with Power Automate: HTTP with Azure AD – Invoke an HTTP Request

 

power automate invoke http request

If you have never used this action before, you will not come across a screen like the one below; first you will come across a screen where you need to login. You need to copy graph.microsoft.com into two fields in the screen.

base eresource

After this step, you need to fill in all 4 fields in the screen.

  • First we choose the POST option for the method field since we will be publishing a message.
  • Next, we will write the link we’ve created above that starts with graph and continues with teams_id and channel_id for the Url of Request field.
  • We write Content-Type into the Enter Key field and application/json into the Enter Value field for the Header section.
  • We paste the code block below into the Body of Request field.
{
"body": {
"content": "General Happy Birthday @{items('Apply_to_each_2')?['DisplayName']}
",
"contentType": "html"
},
"mentions": [
{
"id": 0,
"mentionText": "General",
"mentioned": {
"conversation": {
"id":"19:[email protected]",
"displayName": "Business Applications Trials",
"[email protected]": "#Microsoft.Teams.GraphSvc.conversationIdentityType",
"conversationIdentityType": "channel"
}
}
},
{
"id": 1,
"mentionText": "@{items('Apply_to_each_2')?['DisplayName']}",
"mentioned": {
"application": null,
"device": null,
"conversation": null,
"user": {
"id": "@{items('Apply_to_each_2')?['Id']}",
"displayName": "@{items('Apply_to_each')?['DisplayName']}",
"userIdentityType": "aadUser"
}
}
}
]
}

 

It will look like this after all these steps:

 

http isteği dolu hali

BODY EXPLANATION

Let’s explain the body section a bit. We enter an HTML content we want to the content. You can add images etc. to that content. Inside in the HTML content, we tag the people we want to tag. We you IDs while doing that. We define the ids inside these tags into the mentioned field at the bottom of the code block. We will both tag the channel -which is tagging the group-, and the person. You can give the ID numbers, it doesn’t matter which number you give. The important thing is that it matches with the mentioned field below.

In the mentioned field, we will determine in which chat this post will appear, i.e. we will tag the channel first. And for us, this is the general channel of our Business Applications Trial group. We write our channels id into the id field in conversation. And enter the “Channel” info into ConversationIdentityType. Another thing is to tag the person. We need that person’s Office 365 id while writing their tag. We can get this id through Power Automate. The action we need to use at this point is Office 365 Users- Search User. We get the user’s id by using their e-mail address.

search user

 

We write this id into the related id field. Since we will tag the person, userIdentityType comes instead of ConversationIdentityType. We write “addUser” here aannndd save.

 

That’s it! We are done. The last thing I want to mention is that you can get more detailed information about Teams APIs on Graph from the links below. We also have some other great articles about Power Automate and Teams on our blog, you can check them as well. And also here is the output of this flow.

power automate ile teams de mention

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/channel-post-messages?view=graph-rest-beta&tabs=http

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/chatmessage?view=graph-rest-beta

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/chatmessagemention?view=graph-rest-beta

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/channel-post-messages?view=graph-rest-beta&tabs=http

See you guys, social isolation is important