Tips & Tricks

With Copilot Chat, Copilot in apps, Cowork, Scout (Frontier), declarative agents and custom agents all vying for your attention, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I’ve lost count of how many times someone has asked me, “Should I use Cowork for this or just Copilot Chat?” — and the honest answer is, it depends. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reading my earlier post on Getting Started with Cowork, Scout (Frontier) & the New Copilot Studio UI first — it covers what each of these tools actually does. This post builds on that foundation and gives you a simple framework for choosing the right experience every time, plus two free resources you can use right now to make the decision for you. ...

What if I told you that most of the variables in your Power Automate flows and Power Apps don’t need to be variables at all? In this post, we’ll explore immutable variables — a technique that can dramatically simplify your solutions, reduce API calls, and make your logic cleaner and easier to maintain. This post builds on concepts demonstrated in the accompanying video, where we go beyond the basics to show you practical applications, performance benefits, and best practices. ...

Need to filter a deeply nested JSON object in Power Automate without burning through your API limits? In this post, I’ll show you how to repurpose and filter a JSON array in just two actions — no Apply to Each required — saving you thousands of API calls when working with large datasets. Here is an interesting sample JSON object {}, that contains a JSON array [] with 3 objects. The final solution will have 3000 objects. The aim is to retrieve two key values from the object whilst checking another nested array for a common string ‘ACABA’. Whilst it is perfectly acceptable to use an apply to each and loop through all 3000 objects, this will eat into your 24 hour API limit on the Power Platform and whilst this hasn’t really been a concern in the past, Microsoft are lowering those limits and will begin enforcement once a new admin level report has been released. ...

Need to evenly distribute tasks, form submissions, or emails across your team using Power Automate? Round-robin allocation is the answer, and I’ve got two straightforward approaches you can implement — one using a Microsoft List and another using a Security or Distribution Group. Important: For both solutions, you must limit Concurrency Control and set Parallelism to 1 concurrent flow run. This ensures flows run in serial order and assign users in strict chronological sequence. ...

Need to generate sequential, zero-padded unique IDs in Power Automate — for invoices, filenames, or SharePoint list items? In this post, I’ll show you how to increment your unique ID based on the last file or list item and pad it with leading zeros, all without storing the ID in a separate table. List of Invoices Above is an example Microsoft (SharePoint) List with 3 invoices and a sequential InvoiceID. The key requirement here is that previous invoice ID’s, list items or filenames, will not be deleted as we will use the last known ID as a lookup in the next action. Please also ensure that you DO NOT turn on trigger concurrency, as we must assign the ID during each unique flow run when calling get items. ...

If you’ve ever built a Power Automate flow with dozens of conditions or a massive switch statement, you know how quickly things spiral out of control. In this post, I’ll show you a cleaner approach to handling if/else if/else logic — using arrays and the filter action to dramatically simplify your flows. The Problem with Switch and Parallel Actions **The scenario.**You have a mailbox that you are looking to monitor with a cloud flow and if the subject line matches one of ten possible strings, you want to save the body to a list and email a specific line manager. I’ve started to build the switch solution and then realise, one this is getting out of control, my screen isn’t big enough and two, the condition I need is subject line contains. Surely there is a better way? ...

Dealing with escaped characters in Microsoft Forms responses? If you’ve ever tried to loop through multi-select answers in Power Automate and hit the dreaded “result must be a valid array” error, you’re not alone. In this post, I’ll show you the cleanest way to handle escaped JSON — and it’s simpler than you think. The Problem with Escaped Characters When you select the dynamic answer from a question and run it through an apply to each action you get an error: ...

Got a CSV file you need to turn into a JSON array in Power Automate — without premium connectors? In this post, I’ll share a copy-and-paste Select Action that does exactly that. Just paste it into your flow, adjust the columns, and you’re done — no Apply to Each loops required. I’ve recently covered how to efficiently parse a CSV here vs the age-old apply to each solution. Updated Solution Available Note, that I now have an ever more improved parsing solution. Handle the column keys dynamically. Any shape or sized CSV without the need to edit the existing flow. Retrieve data from OneDrive, SharePoint and Outlook Attachements. ...

Working with dates in Power Automate can be frustrating — especially when you hit the dreaded “The datetime string must match ISO 8601 format” error. In this post, I’ll walk you through every action and expression available for manipulating dates, and show you exactly how to reformat date strings so they play nicely with Power Automate. You can read up about ISO 8601 here but ultimately it means [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD], I explain how to repurpose your date time string below - click here ...

Believe it or not, there’s no built-in SUM function in Power Automate. If you need to add up a list of numbers, you’re typically stuck using an Apply to Each loop with a variable — and for large lists, that’s painfully slow. In this post, I’ll show you a creative hack using the Select action that summed over 600 numbers in literally zero seconds. I also cover how to handle negative numbers and floats. ...