Power Automate For Beginners
How much of your Excel work are you doing ‘in the cloud’ these days? In Sharepoint, OneDrive or another shared platform? The world of online productivity feels exciting and certainly makes collaboration with colleagues easier. Perhaps you’re finding, however, that you spend a lot of time doing manual work in the cloud? It’s the same old jobs, just in a different environment that can feel alien to the desktop Excel user, and without the option of calling on VBA to automate processes!
Since VBA is not available in Office online, and other automation tools such as Power Query are only partially integrated, how do you automate tasks in the cloud? In this video, I introduce you to a powerful automation tool not only for Excel online, but for automating tasks across the entire Office suite of products. Want to adjust some data in a spreadsheet according to an input from Microsoft Forms, then send an acknowledgement email via Outlook, all with a button click? It’s all possible with Power Automate.
Because we’re ‘in the cloud’ for this one, there are no files to download - I have linked to the resources below on OneDrive. I use the free version of Power Automate in this video, though the functions used do require a work or education account to access. I hope, as usual, you’ll work along with me to begin learning the skills yourself. Welcome to Power Automate for Beginners!
Let’s deal with the key concepts first and build a mental framework for what we’re going to do. Some of the terms have (approximate) equivalents in VBA, so let’s go through them.
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A Power Automate routine is called a flow. A flow, like a VBA routine is a short computer programme – simply a set of instructions to help us get something done. Unlike VBA, flows do not live on a computer (unless you download the desktop version of Power Automate which, in my opinion, sort of defeats the point!) You access your flows by signing into Power Automate. I do this via the Microsoft 365 welcome page in the video.
Flows are triggered by … triggers. Power Automate’s triggers are a key advantage over good old VBA. Rather than clicking a button in a desktop Excel file, a flow can be triggered in the cloud in any number of ways. When a Microsoft Form is submitted, an Outlook email received or a file uploaded to a Sharepoint folder, for example. Moreover, flows can be scheduled to run in the background at specific time intervals. In the video, I use a manual trigger for testing purposes, so it’s up to you to explore the possibilities here!
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Flows start with a trigger and then follow a sequence of steps or actions. An action is a specific set of instructions to do something useful. The key difference here is how involved you are with actual coding: rather than making you code ‘organically’, Power Automate supplies bundles of code for you to adapt via a user-friendly interface which correspond to specific tasks. So, it doesn’t feel like you’re coding at all; rather, you’re piecing things together more conceptually. These bundles of code, known as ‘actions’ are categorized by the tool they interact with. Excel Online, for example, provides actions to add and delete rows, create tables and do a host of other things with online spreadsheets.
The final key concept is connectors. The Microsoft universe comprises dozens (hundreds?) of productivity tools, many more than the staples of Excel, Word and Powerpoint. To allow Power Automate to interact with these tools, you must ensure you are signed in to each one. This can feel onerous and, unless you manage access very conscientiously, you will feel like you are signing in and authenticating a lot when using Power Automate. But, by facilitating interaction between tools, these connectors make the magic happen – so it’s well worth it!
In the video, I use flows, triggers, actions and connectors to automate a traditional Excel manual task using Power Automate. Make sure you follow along with me and try to build a flow yourself.
I would love to hear your impressions of Power Automate. Have you used it yourself, and do you have any questions or success stories? Leave me a comment below, I will get back to you there …
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