7 Handy Things You Can Do with Power Automate

If you’re anything like the rest of us, your working life is probably pretty hectic. With numerous Teams channels to stay on top of and rafts of emails to respond to, as well as tasks to tick off the list, hours can race by and leave us struggling to get everything done.

So, why not allow Microsoft Power Automate to help?

By automating and simplifying tasks, Power Automate (part of the Power Platform) can help you boost your productivity, help you manage your workload and give you time back to spend on your priority tasks.

With the ability to connect to around 300 different data sources, as well as any publicly available application programming interface (API), you can automate a vast range of computer-based tasks, from Excel number crunching through to social media monitoring.

Here are seven handy automation or ‘flow’ templates that can be easily adopted, customised and used to help you make the most of the hours in your working day.

1. Schedule meetings in seconds

 
Ever get several people a day messaging you on Teams to see when the best time would be to get a meeting in with you? By adding this simple flow, you can schedule a meeting with the person/people sending these messages without even leaving your Teams chat. 

2. Set yourself a reminder

When you’re immersed in work, it can be easy to forget if there’s something you need to step away for. Whatever it is you need to get done at a certain time of day, Power Automate makes it easy to set reminders at intervals that suit you to make sure nothing goes under the radar.

3. Never lose an attachment again

We’ve all done it: been sent an attachment, but when the time comes that we actually need it, had to ask for it to be resent. Power Automate enables you to set up a flow which automatically saves any attachments you receive into a OneDrive folder for you. To take this one step further, you can have OneDrive create a custom folder with the date the email was received, making it even easier to find when you do need the attachment to hand.

4. Automate your approvals processes

When you have documents that need to follow a set approval process, Power Automate can away the stress that comes with chasing key stakeholders. Adding a predefined list of users that need to approve the document, all you have to do is add the document to SharePoint – from there, reminders will be automatically sent to those who need to give approval for the document to be signed off.

5. Stop emails interrupting your flow

It’s not uncommon to read a message half-way through doing something, think ‘I’ll respond to that later’ and then forget all about it. Using Power Automate, you can create automatic reminders that prompt you to respond to a message after a specified amount of time, helping you stay focused on the task at hand without forgetting messages that have arrived in the meantime altogether.

6. Stay in the know with Microsoft products

If you’re keen on getting updates on new and exciting features coming to a specific Microsoft product (Power Automate or otherwise), you can set up a notification to let you know when new blogs are posted. This helps you make the most of any new features as soon as they launch.

Bonus tip: If there are other blogs relevant to your role that you like to read regularly, you can set up reminders for these, too. All you need is the RDF site summary (RSS) feed URL.

7. Keep track of your to-do list

With Teams a popular method of communication these days, we often get asked to complete tasks there, rather than through email and these can be harder to track – but they needn’t be! With Power Automate, you can have tasks mentioned in Teams automatically added to a Planner board to help you keep organised and stay on top of the tasks you’ve been assigned.