Tutorials

Want to generate charts from Excel data and automatically send them to Teams, email, or embed them in Word and PDF documents? In this post, I’ll show you how to use Office Scripts with Power Automate to create dynamic charts as images and distribute them however you need. These charts can be created and returned as images to Power Automate and then used in any document of your choice. Send the chart via Teams. Send the chart(s) to external users via email. Embed the charts into Word, HTML, or permanent PDF files using Premium or regular actions. ...

The ultimate free solution, parse any CSV file to a JSON Array via a Power Automate Flow. This flow will parse any CSV file, no matter the encoding. It will handle Unix, Windows, or Mac files. The key values (i.e. the header row) will be dynamically mapped and it will handle CSV files of all shapes and sizes. Whilst I have previously blogged about parsing an array with a select action, this solution did not handle varying header lengths automatically. ...

If you regularly receive emails with attachments that need filing into specific SharePoint folders or sites, this one’s for you. In this post, I’ll show you how to use Power Automate to automatically save email attachments to a custom folder or SharePoint site based on the subject line or file name. This use case was originally inspired by Xerox Docucentres, which enable end-users to email themselves a scanned document — but it applies equally to any routine email with attachments. This can be achieved relatively easily and would save you a lot of routine administration time. ...

Need to dynamically pull the choice values from a SharePoint column into your Power Automate flow? There’s a handy but little-known REST endpoint in the SharePoint API that makes this straightforward. In this post, I’ll show you how to call it and format the results into a clean array for use in your Cloud Flow. The SharePoint REST Endpoint Here is an example Choice Column in SharePoint: Using the endpoint http://myserver/_vti_bin/ListData.svc where myserver is the SharePoint site URL, you will retrieve an XML formatted list of all collections of information available on this site. Here you can browse a list of the various data collection names. ...

Invited an external guest into your Microsoft Team only to find they can’t access any files? You’re not alone — this is one of the most common SharePoint and Teams issues I come across. In this post, I’ll show you exactly why it happens and how your SharePoint admin can fix it, including a PowerShell script for those tricky private channel scenarios. “We can’t get your files. We’re working on getting them back” ...

Off the back of my Power Platform Quiz concept where I first used the HTTP API, I have built a solution that in real-time will dynamically serve up files hosted on SharePoint, also using the HTTP API in Power Automate! I first learned about this possibility whilst in discussion with Paul at TachyTelic. This is a working proof of concept and I would love to get your feedback. Imagine that you create documents that need to be served up to the public via your website. You might have version control on these and you might want approval. Quite often the file would be saved to a traditional server or onto a SharePoint document library and then comes the time of publishing. You get in contact with your web team, you send them a copy of the document and they publish the file to the website for you. What happens next? You spot a typo and you need to edit the file and have the Web Team republish that file via the corporate content management system. How much time would you spend on this process each time? ...

Need to combine data from multiple sources — like Excel tables and SharePoint lists — into a single array in Power Automate? In this post, I’ll show you how to create a one-to-one relationship between non-relational data sources using a single Apply to Each loop, filter arrays, and a compose trick to build a clean JSON array for the next stage of your flow. Data Sources Excel Sheet contains two tables of data that are related by the ID ...

Need to send personalised emails with unique attachments — like monthly invoices — to a list of customers? In this post, I’ll show you how to build a mail merge with attachments in Power Automate, pulling customer data from Excel and attaching the right file for each recipient automatically. If you have a requirement for creating invoices in an automated fashion please take a look at some of my other ideas here: ...

Ever wished you could populate an Excel invoice template as easily as a Word template in Power Automate? Excel doesn’t offer a built-in “Populate Template” action, but Office Scripts in Excel On the Web (currently in preview as of March 2021) changes everything. In this post, I’ll show you how to use TypeScript and Office Scripts to dynamically complete an Excel invoice via Power Automate. Watch the demo here ...

Looking to automate ServiceNow with Power Automate Desktop? After my previous post demonstrating how PAD can close down ServiceNow calls and save admin time, I was asked to do a step-by-step build video. Below you’ll find a 20-minute walkthrough covering the entire process. End to end build demo ...