Blog

Ever wanted to automatically control your Microsoft Teams status — Available, Busy, or Do Not Disturb — without touching the app? In this post, I’ll show you how to use Power Automate with a couple of undocumented API endpoints to set your presence, update your status message, and even configure an expiry. The method is undocumented and for you to explore and test independently, but based on my initial tests, it works. Interested in giving this a try yourself? Then please read on. ...

Need a quick way to let people register for your events and automatically send them a calendar invite? In this post, I’ll show you how to combine Microsoft Forms with Power Automate and Outlook to build a simple attendee registration system — no premium connectors required. Update Sept 2022 - looking to automatically disable your form or maybe trying to prevent attendees from receiving duplicate emails and anonomise attendees? Check out those links and see how it is done. ...

Ever tried to post an email attachment directly to a Teams channel using Power Automate, only to find the built-in actions don’t support it? If you receive emails with attachments or generate regular documents, you might want to post them direct to Teams. In this post, I’ll show you how a custom connector makes this possible. I have covered how to build the custom connector in my recent post How To? Build It! Custom Connector. In this post, I will use this connector and share with you my flow. ...

Have you ever fancied your own trigger or action that you can call from Power Automate? This very same connector can be used in PowerApps too or you can build one specific for your Logic App. I am going to show you how I built a custom connector for the Graph API. The API call in question will allow me to post an attachment to Teams chat. This is currently not supported by the native Teams actions in Power Automate. I also have an article on how the flow is built here. ...

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. ...

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: ...