Tutorials

Can you encrypt and decrypt a string using Power Automate? My son challenged me with this question after covering the Vigenère Cipher in school, and I couldn’t resist building it. In this post, I’ll show you how to implement a full Vigenère Cipher in Power Automate — without a single Apply to Each — and there’s even a live version you can try yourself. What is the Vigenere Cipher? The Vigenere cipher was invented by Blaise de Vigenere in the 16th century. It is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of interwoven Caesar ciphers, with each letter of the plaintext being shifted based on a keyword. ...

Want to keep your organisation informed about Microsoft 365 service health without constantly checking the admin centre? In this post, I’ll show you how I used Power Automate with an Azure App Registration and the Graph API to pull service health and message centre data into a SharePoint List, Teams alerts, and more. We’ll start by creating an Azure app registration and using the Graph API to bring data into Power Automate. From there, you can save this information to a SharePoint List, publish it to your organisation, build a Power App, or set alerts for degraded service health via Teams or email. ...

Ever since Microsoft removed the ability to add users to Exchange Distribution Lists via the Graph API, Power Automate users have been stuck. In this post, I’ll walk you through a workaround using PowerShell and Azure Runbooks to get distribution list management back into your flows. It’s been over 12 months since I wrote my blog post Add members to a distribution list – Power Automate where initially it was possible to add members directly. That functionality was removed by design and has never made a comeback. Fortunately, I came across PowerShell commands to both add and remove users from a distribution group — and we can bring this to an Azure Runbook. For more details on the Graph API limitation, see Working with groups in Microsoft Graph. ...

Need to load a bunch of tasks into Microsoft Planner without clicking through the UI one by one? Using Power Automate and Excel (or any other available data source 😉), you can bulk import tasks into Planner in a single flow run. I have previously recorded a video on this process and use both a tasks table and a config table to support this cloud flow. This will enable you to dynamically choose the group and plan name, as well as import planner tasks involving a title, bucket id / name, start and due date, assigned user ids, a category, priority, check list and file attachment(s)! This flow is not for the faint hearted but should support you with your goal to build a Planner Power Automate integration. ...

Power Automate has an action “Export to File for Power BI Reports” which enables you to export a Power BI Visual or Page as a PDF, Power Point (PPTX) or Image (PNG) file. Below you will learn about the Workspace requirements, how to identify the report page and visual names and how to implement a report level filter. We will explore common errors, how to setup your Power Automate Cloud flow, some of the limitations, the Power BI Playground and finally saving the exported file to SharePoint and sending via Teams or Email. ...

Have you ever needed to automatically disable a Microsoft Form — say, when an event reaches capacity? In this post, I’ll show you how to programmatically close a form using Power Automate with a single HTTP action, and we’ll explore some practical use cases for this technique. Why Disable a Form Automatically? It is technically possible to disable a Microsoft Form from Power Automate. Why would you want to do this? Maybe it’s time limited - ok sure you can specify an end date via the existing UI. But what if that date or time was to be dynamic? ...

If you’ve ever used the standard Outlook Events connector in Power Automate, you’ll know the frustration — every time you add a new attendee, everyone on the invite gets notified, and all attendees can see each other. In this post, I’ll show you how to use the Graph API and the Update Event call to add attendees without notifying others and hide all attendees from each other. Related: Event Registration with Microsoft Forms I’ve previously blogged about managing events using Microsoft Forms. Put simply, enable users to register for a specific event using Microsoft Forms and Power Automate. But unfortunately this resulted in all attendees receiving an update when someone new completed the form. If you combine this blog with my solution above or watch my video on my YouTube, you can buildyourself a very handy event registration system using Power Automate. ...

Ever had a user accidentally delete a critical Power Automate flow? Until May 2022, your only option was to raise a support call with Microsoft — but that all changed when the Restore-AdminFlow cmdlet was released. In this post, I’ll walk you through restoring deleted flows with PowerShell and show you how to build a self-service solution using Azure Runbooks, Power Automate, and Power Apps. There are native actions in Power Automate for adminstering flows but there is no current timescales for releasing an action to restore flows directly. If you were wondering if it was possible to restore flows from Power Automate or Power Apps using the Platform, then I have a solution for you - Azure Runbooks. I have a blog post showing you how I built a Runbook to change the sharing options of SharePoint using Power Automate. ...

Need to split a large Excel workbook into multiple worksheets — or even separate files — based on a column value? With Office Scripts and Power Automate, you can automatically detect unique values in a key column, create a sheet for each one, and populate them with the relevant data in seconds. Furthermore, if you would rather unique workbooks for each of those distinct names, I’ve got a solution for that too and you could use the final script just to bulk load data into Excel efficiently, without using any add a row actions. ...

Want your Power Virtual Agent to do more than just answer static questions? Making your chatbot truly interactive is achievable using Power Automate. When the bot asks the end user a question, it can accept input (entities), pass these to Power Automate and then in return tailor a response, based on the outcome of your flow. In order to demonstrate this, I built a parcel history bot that would query the DHL Tracking API and return to the user the current status and event history for a valid Tracking ID. This method can be re-applied to Microsoft Lists, Dataverse, Connectors and any other 3rd party API. You can watch a demo and see how it was built in more detail below. ...