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The most popular reviews in /r/MicrosoftFlow:
Hey! Have to tried implementing the approval for leave template? Give it a shot, then spend time taking it apart and tailoring it to your needs.
I'm assuming the flow fails on the create item step in the flow? You can put alternate steps after that if the step fails using "Configure run after". Usually if you don't have this and the step fails, the whole flow will fail.
Do you mean a SharePoint list? If so, you can definitely do that. You are using a column modification as the trigger.
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/run-a-flow-when-a-sharepoint-column-is-modified/
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/best-practices-for-production-flows/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/overview-solution-flows
These should be a good start. Solution aware flows have their own caveats, but if you're looking to manage multiple environment spanning deployments they're really the only way.
Your trigger is Outlook, when new email arrives. Set it so it runs only with attachments. Also apply a filter on it to only find your Excel doc using xlxs
You can then save it where you need to in OneDrive.
Follow this template to start
If i understand it all correctly...This could be achieved now.
Its a little bit of a work around instead of a direct trigger but... Since the Excel survey drops into a workbook hosted on OneDrive as long as that workbook had a table in it, you could use the recurrence trigger to check for new rows in that Excel file every 10 minutes, every hour, daily... whatever was needed, and then take further action from there.
For an example of this you could check out this blog post https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/flow-of-the-week-creating-appointments-from-excel-table/ as i do something really similar here...
to understand it in the sense of your scenario, imagine that the survey is populating the excel file I use as a sample, and then my action off of the rows is to create appointments. Yours could be whatever next place you need the data to go.
Am i on track with this?
You can set up IFTTT applet that will trigger Power Automate flow every time new post appears on subreddit, check this one:
https://ifttt.com/applets/cYGmL7kU-reddit-new-posts-in-subreddit-notification
Triggering PA from IFTTT is simply a matter of setting up proper REST API call. IFTTT is free, but I think there is a limitiation on number of applets. If you are only interested in this use case than one should be enough for you.
I am sorry for being a novice but not sure exactly what you mean.
You want me to go to flow.microsoft.com then to create a new PVA flow?
Power Virtual Agent --> Compose --> Initialize variable ---> Get files (properties only)---Apply to each--->Return values to Power virtual Agents?
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It doesnt seem I can post a screenshot in this environment. If you can provide an example as I am just starting out and anything you can do would be severly beneficial to my learning path.
It looks good but I’m wondering if there is a character in the link it doesn’t like. As a test why not create a compose, add the following:
And send that back to PVA? That will first prove that you can send a link back to PVA. You can keep the apply to each etc as it won’t cause any harm. The compose can come before or after all those actions and can be deleted later. Then, once you have the compose working, we need to sort out what is up with the apply to each and append to string.
First, never use Excel as a data source. The Flow connectors for Excel have file lockouts of 6-12 minutes. Use a SharePoint list or a Dataverse table.
Second, Microsoft actually has a Leave Request Power App template - https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/create-and-manage-leave-requests-with-ease
You could then use the data source, to create a basic Power BI dashboard for the managers to view - https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps?product=power-bi-visuals&page=1&src=office&search=calendar
Cheers for the shout out. I’ve a live demo of this solution, ms forms to word and then pdf and a blog article to supplement the video you link to.
https://www.damobird365.com/microsoft-forms-to-pdf-no-premium-actions/
Feel free to DM me if you have any questions and I will try to help.
I haven’t used Lists at all so I really can’t say anything about it. But what I’ve read Lists is more accessible Sharepoint list, and that I have used my fair share of.
If you google, ‘why excel isn’t a database’ you will get a lot of results explaining why you should considering putting data in a database instead of excel/Lists.
Best I can really suggest is one of Microsoft's app in a day classes. I did mine on site but there seems to be some online ones you can do on-demand https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/free-app-in-a-day-powerapps-training-and-more-from-pragmatic-works/
The app we built was a Computer purchasing canvas app, with a model driven app and business process flow as the backend.
Aside from that.... not sure if you've got access, but the D365 Sales suite has in built business process flows to facilitate the sales processes
AAAND as soon as I said this, MS published a blog introducing a new connector. Now you can get alerts when a dataflow completes using connectors.
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It's doable but not really entry level... Well kinda.
You'd want to create a Word "template" file using the Developer tab. It's a whole thing that's not super user-friendly. Here's Microsoft's doc on that. You won't be doing any "mail merge" like the olden days. Create a Word doc from a template
So to answer your steps
- MS Flow is a good place to trigger this sort of flow. Keep mind you need to do the trigger "when a response is submitted" and then an action "Get a response". If your form is hosted on a Team site (i.e. SharePoint Group), you'll need to grab the response ID, which is a weird workaround.
- You can actually create a form direct from an Excel table, it makes it a little easier. You could then link back to the Microsoft Form. (Link: how to create a form from Excel
- This part would be the action "Populate a Microsoft Word Template". You'll use the values from "Get a response" in your Word template.
- For this, it's a little wonky. You'll want to do the "Create file" action in either SharePoint or OneDrive.
- You can also convert to PDF here if you want.
My initial question is, does it have to be in Word? Do they have to get a file, or would an email suffice?
There’s templates that get you that will get you an excel file Log new tasks created in Planner in Excel Online (Business)". and update excel when task completed
well. Geez. I guess I'm curious what you've tried. That isn't an email I can really try and just construct.
I was going to try tactics like these:
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shared_mailparser/mailparser/
To do this via an email, you'd build a regular (cloud) flow with the trigger being when a mailbox (you have access to) gets an email, and you can specify parameters of the email as well - certain subject and/or from a certain sender for example.
Then the cloud flow will call the desktop flow.
You need the "Per user plan with attended RPA" license to do this -
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing
yeah, quick search I just found a template!! Check out this Power Automate template - "Save my email attachments to a SharePoint document library". https://flow.microsoft.com/galleries/public/templates/f7a46809e53c42108034e56acf83bb79
Sweet. You'll want to have Flow check the Excel document that contains the Form responses. Or, you can store the responses in SharePoint (my preferred method).
This blog goes over a process similar to yours. There are a lot of great video tutorials you can find just by googling what you want to do (i.e. "Microsoft flow do until reminders) .
I'd also recommend you check out some of the premade templates and edit them a little just to get an idea of how things work.
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/approval-reminders-using-parallel-branches/
Okay, wow. I got it to work, but I don't know how.
So I tried to create a flow following your workflow, but I got the same result as you did. I received the attachments, but they wouldn't open. I could open the files in SharePoint just fine as well.
I tried everything. I found this post and and tried both Vytenis' and James' solutions in the comments, but neither worked.
I finally tried to just manually enter in the expression:
outputs('Get_attachment_content')?['body']
in the content section of append to array, instead of selecting the "Attachment Content" under Dynamic content even though they are the same thing. And it worked. Even weirder, it now works if I just select the dynamic content, "Attachment Content". I swear I did that earlier and it came through corrupted.
Here's the relevant part that works now. https://i.imgur.com/8qyARLf.png
Yep, you can add your ODATA query to the advanced section of the Get Items action. Hopefully this will give you some pointers https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/advanced-flow-of-the-week-filtering-with-odata/
Uhh there are a few issues.
First, just try to get the basic functionality down before you customize it too much.
Your filter is not in the correct format, so it probably fails to return anything if it goes through at all. I'd say get rid of the filter for now, until you get the rest working.
The "Apply to each" loop is going to update the item for each result you get from the Get Items action. I don't think you want this.
Instead, in the apply to each, check to make sure the email value of the current item matches the email that you are looking for. If it does, Update the main item with the address from the current item in the loop.
Once you get this working you can try to customize the ODATA filter query.
The standard mail connector uses a MS account to send from so you don't need credentials for that one.
On O365 Outlook connector make sure you are using a O365 account (not on premise) or a hybrid account.
Also, note the "Send an email" is deprecated. You need to use "Send an email v2".
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/office-365-outlook-connector-important-upcoming-changes/
I did the same thing... I found a template and then tried to modify it to work for me without really understanding how it worked. But then I realized that instead of using the template, you can also build it from scratch and the directions would explain each step and why you're doing it: example
Only problem is that some of these directions are now outdated, but it is still really helpful. I hope you can figure it out!
I saw that come up a lot, but I read that early this month advanced mode was removed. Is it possible to build that condition without it? There's never a "less than" or "greater than" option in the condition field https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/build-more-powerful-conditions-in-flows-and-more/
Hi Jon.
We have SP 2016 on-prem, and I am new to flow. I see on the sign-up and pricing page that there is a free tier, but how would I sign up the organization rather than link it to my personal or work live ID?
Also, to install as mentioned here, https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/on-premises-data-gateway/ would I install the gateway software on the SharePoint app server that runs the central administration service?
We are currently using SPD with standard workflows, so I am not sure what the adoption on Flow would look like, however I would like to roll it out as a company-wide deployment so it is available as needed.
Regarding the other tiers, with 500+ employees, but possibly only 50 that would use it, does that mean if we purchased 50 licenses, it would allow 50 users to create as many flows as they like and be the owner of it, but an employee (number 51) attempted to make one, it would not allow it?
If that is the case, how would I prevent anyone except the 50 designated from creating a flow?
Thank you.
Reading this it appears that it queues up the process until after the time limit has been reached.
Could it be possible that you were missing records as they were waiting in the queue and haven't been executed yet.
I am positive that I need one way synch. From excel to SharePoint Online list.
Issue is that I am able to add list item from excel using your great post but I am not able to update list item from excel.
Let's customise your post@https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/managing-new-hire-onboarding
If I want to update list item (say Update FULL NAME) from excel where "AddToList" not equals "No" and "Status" not equal to "Complete" , first thing, "SharePoint - Update Item" action requires is ID of the list item that needs to be update. I am not able to pass the ID as shown in the image
Hope this help to explain the issue
I'm looking into other solutions as well such as https://zapier.com but even there I wasn't able to set a trigger based on data in the excel sheet.
Will continue looking or might have to just make a Python script.