Blog

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 ...

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. ...

Sometimes you don’t want Power Automate to send an email directly — you want to review it first. In this post, I’ll show you how easy it is to create a draft email in your Outlook Drafts folder using Power Automate and the Graph API. You can review, edit and send this email directly from your Outlook Mailbox. As well as a video to demonstrate how this is possible, I will further extend the concept below and show you how you can include attachments as part of your draft email. ...

Ever had a Power Automate flow fail silently while you were busy with something else? If you’re running multiple flows throughout the day, relying on Microsoft’s delayed failure notifications isn’t enough. In this post, I’ll show you how to build a proactive try-catch error handling pattern that emails you the exact error details and a direct link to the failed run — so you can start fixing issues immediately. Using Scopes for Try-Catch Error Handling Firstly, you need to group your main steps of a flow into a Scope control. There are various advantages of a scope. It makes your flow appear more compact, can make it easier to navigate and understand, and most importantly means you can use the result() expression to obtain the history of an action. In my example below my main steps are in the try scope with the magic all happening in the catch scope. Note that the result expression can only return first level actions but can also be used to retrieve the results of actions in an apply to each. Watch my video to see how this might be possible. ...

Want to learn Power Apps while having fun? Whether you’re building your first app or looking to get your child or class started with Power Apps, this is a great place to start learning by doing. I was challenged by my 9-year-old daughter, Emily, to build a Power App with her and create a YouTube video(s). This marks the first of a few articles demonstrating how to get started with a basic application that will teach you the basics of Power Apps. It is based on a simple data source, an Excel Spreadsheet. It will enable those with basic access to Power Apps, the ability to create the solution. In an ideal world, you would use a Microsoft List or, if licensed, a DataVerse Table(s). As my daughter will be building her solution on her Glow Scotland Education Tenant where she is licensed for Power Apps, she cannot create Teams (for Teams DataVerse or a Microsoft List) and I didn’t want to run the risk of building Custom Tables in the Glow Default Environment. If none of this makes sense, don’t worry as I will try to drop the technical lingo going forward - any questions please ask. ...

If you’re receiving daily or weekly Excel workbooks where the data isn’t formatted as a table, you’ll hit a wall trying to query it in Power Automate. The fix? Office Scripts. With a relatively simple piece of TypeScript, you can insert a Table into your Excel Worksheet. Not only can the script detect the used range of rows and columns but it can also run on a specific sheet and specifically name your table. If Table1 isn’t what you are looking for, call it as you please, all automatically, via Power Automate. ...

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. ...