If you've never heard of Microsoft Power Automate, then you're potentially missing out on a very powerful tool that can do wonders for your workflow. PC users can access this tool through their Microsoft 365 subscription (and therefore, through 365's online portal) as well as the Microsoft app store. Power Automate allows you to automate daily tasks within or between various pieces of software so you can offload things like scheduled reminders, instant sorting, or otherwise to be handled by an automated process.
While there are other ways of automating your PC, using Microsoft Power Automate will streamline your processes in a very straightforward way, not to mention with first-party support. After all, if you can do it with Excel and macros, you should be able to do it with Windows.
Using AI and low code, Microsoft Power Automate does what most people expect of AI these days and that's to make life easier by taking care of those tedious tasks. Not to be confused with Microsoft's Copilot's approach as an assistant, this app is more about taking work off your plate instead of assisting you. It's not hard to learn how to use, although some features like Microsoft Dataverse entitlements and unattended automation require a subscription.
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Even in its free form, this is a powerful piece of software that can help streamline your workflow. Plus, you can connect to all sorts of third-party apps, not just those created by Microsoft. To inspire some useful automations you could establish, here are some examples of the conveniences it could grant you.
5 Automate an email reminder
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Whether you want to remind yourself to take out the trash every Thursday or give everyone at the office a heads-up for a weekly Zoom call, Microsoft Power Automate makes it incredibly easy to send out an email reminder.
There are some restrictions if you're using the most basic version, either through a trial or Microsoft 365. If this is the case, you can only send email reminders via Outlook or Gmail, while the latter also requires you to link Power Automate to your Gmail. Once you've created your flow and tested it though, which takes just minutes to set up, all you have to do is save your automation, then you (and your team, depending on the reminder) will start to receive email reminders on schedule without any extra input or work from now until the collapse of civilization (or whenever the program sunsets).
4 Automatically download attachments
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There is a whole trove of automation that can be done through your email beyond just setting up reminders. You can also create flows that monitor your inbox to trigger certain actions as emails come in. For instance, you can use an already created template in Power Automate that will monitor Outlook and download any attachment directly into Dropbox for you.
You're not limited to only working with Outlook and Dropbox, either. You can set up the same between Outlook and OneDrive or Google Drive, not to mention create an identical flow between Gmail and Google Drive. Plus, so many automations like this have templates so that you don't have to create them from scratch.
3 Integrate Planner with Teams
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If you use Microsoft Teams to not only chat with others in your workspace but to coordinate a schedule, you can integrate Microsoft's Planner into Teams in multiple ways. For instance, you can make a Power Automate flow that will create a new Planner task any time a channel post starts with "TODO," eliminating the need to manually create said task after the fact.
You can also automate things by letting a team or chat know when a Planner task status has changed. That way, if you've crossed something off your list, you don't have to remember to update everyone - Power Automate will do it for you.
2 Automate third party software like Salesforce
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Though it's been mentioned, our examples of tasks you can automate have not really included much in the way of third-party apps thus far. Not to worry though, if you need to use Power Automate to work with something like Salesforce, you can.
There are plenty of templates already available to use, from notifying people on Teams when there's a new Salesforce lead, to creating new leads in Salesforce from incoming emails, just to name a few. Just be aware that integrating with Salesforce requires at least the Power Automate premium subscription.
1 Extract data into Excel Online
Again, this requires a premium or better subscription, but you can keep Excel documents up-to-date based on incoming data. While you can do some straightforward data collection such as adding rows to reflect new emails, you might need to also invest in a program like Parserr if you want to parse your emails for data to insert into Excel Online automatically using Microsoft Power Automate.
This program allows Power Automate to search emails and PDF attachments for specific information like invoice numbers and such, in order to automatically update an Excel spreadsheet with key information. This means that you could potentially automate a chunk of your bookkeeping and save yourself significant time.
The tip of the iceberg
Microsoft Power Automate is a fairly deep program since it uses a combination of AI and low code (basic commands that don't require knowledge of coding) along with the ability to integrate with a wide variety of first- and third-party apps to implement automations that will be truly useful to you.
What I've shared here are just some of the most popular applications for Microsoft Power Automate, most of which already have pre-existing templates. All you have to do is log into the appropriate accounts through the Power Automate interface before setting up a flow. Keep in mind, there are a number of different types of flows available. You can create scheduled flows such as the email reminders, automated flows such as collecting data from emails, or instant flows such as saving an attachment as it comes in.
It's also worth knowing that you can use Microsoft Power Automate through your web browser or download it onto your computer. Either way, this is a powerful tool that, with just a little bit of setup and experimentation, can automate a lot of digital tedium so that you can focus on what really matters.
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