Book Image

Workflow Automation with Microsoft Power Automate - Second Edition

By : Aaron Guilmette
4 (2)
Book Image

Workflow Automation with Microsoft Power Automate - Second Edition

4 (2)
By: Aaron Guilmette

Overview of this book

MS Power Automate is a workflow automation tool built into MS 365 to help businesses automate repetitive tasks or trigger business processes without user intervention. It is a low-code tool that is part of the Microsoft applications framework, the Power Platform. If you are new to Power Automate, this book will give you a comprehensive introduction and a smooth transition from beginner to advanced topics to help you get up to speed with business process automation. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to configure automation workflows for business processes between hundreds of applications, using examples within Microsoft and including third-party apps like Dropbox and Twitter. Once you understand how to use connectors, triggers, and actions to automate business processes, you’ll learn how to manage user input, documents, and approvals, as well as interact with databases. This edition also introduces new Power Automate features such as using robotic process automation (RPA) to automate legacy applications, interacting with the Microsoft Graph API, and working with artificial intelligence models to do sentiment analysis. By the end of this digital transformation book, you’ll have mastered the basics of using Power Automate to replace repetitive tasks with automation technology.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
21
Index

Learning about button flows

Button flows (or instant cloud flows), as previously mentioned, are manually triggered flows. They don’t monitor anything, nor do they have any sort of REST-based trigger that instantiates them. Button flows can be used for a variety of low-impact tasks, such as executing reminders or notifying individuals.

A button or instant flow can be created in three different ways:

  • From a button flow template
  • From a blank template
  • Imported from a package

One of the best ways to get started, especially when working with common tasks, is to look at the examples of others and templates. If you think you might be doing something that someone else has done before, a template is a great place to start. You can also import previously saved and exported flows (you’ll learn more about this in Chapter 18, Exporting, Importing, and Distributing Flows).

Button flows can be created from either the Power Automate mobile app...