Hi. Imagine walking from
office to office to get your work
approved or spending your time on repetitive tasks. In this lesson, you
will learn how you can leverage Power
Automate to build simple workflow to help improve productivity and simplify tasks. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explore and build from existing
flow templates, create a flow triggered by a new record or record change, and explain how flow can automate and
customize approvals. With Power Automate's hundreds of connectors and templates, you can easily write
flows and get back to spending your valuable
time on the work you love. To help you get started, you can explore the
countless flow templates available to build
the perfect solution. First, sign into a Power Automate using your
organizational account. Next, on the Power
Automate homepage, select templates from the
navigation menu on the left. To find specific
templates or categories, you can type a word
or phrase like Dataverse into the
search templates field. Click the magnifying glass icon or press "Enter" to search. Then select the template
you want to use. You can now see a description and details about the template, including the data sources
that the template connects to. Now that you have browse
through some of the templates, you may agree that they are
great for getting started. The good news is
that these templates can also be customized. Imagine that you work at Contoso Manufacturing and you must search for
email attachments. This can be a very time-consuming
and frustrating task. With Power Automate, you can
build a flow that stores all your email attachments
in a folder on your Microsoft OneDrive
for Business account. Thankfully, there's a template
to help you get started. Save Office 365
email attachments to OneDrive for Business is one
of the one-click templates. Here you can read the
descriptions that can answer questions that are
necessary to build your flow. This will help you so that you don't have to write
a line of code. On the template graphic, there is a description
of what the template does and what it
needs to succeed. On the Power Automate homepage,
navigate to templates. Use the search templates field
to locate the Save Office 365 email attachments to
OneDrive for Business template. Click the template to open
the template details page. You will need to enter
your credentials for the Microsoft Office
365 Outlook and Microsoft OneDrive
for Business Services if you are not signed in. Then click "Continue" to
create the process flow. The flow connects to your work email to get any attachments. The flow will then
create a folder on your OneDrive for
business account. This automatically places
every attachment that's sent to your work email
address in that folder. Click "Edit" to
view the details of the process flow that
has been implemented, or you can delete
the connection. From the flow builder, you can now click
through the trigger and the actions to see how this
flow was built for you. You will notice that
there is no code, and you can change everything or extended it to better
meet your business needs. You can, for example, try to configure
the flow to process only the emails from your
boss. Here's a hint. Click on "Show
Advanced Options", add your boss's email to the new email trigger
details, and then save. Now that you know how easy it is to start from a template, let's look at a couple of key concepts when
building flows. Every flow has two main parts, a trigger and one
or more actions. You can think of the trigger as the starting action
for the flow. The trigger can be something
like a new email arriving in your inbox or when a new item is added
to a SharePoint list. Actions, on the other hand, are what you want to happen
when a trigger is invoked. For example, the new
email trigger will start the action of creating a new file on OneDrive
for Business. Other examples of actions
include sending an email, posting a tweet, and
starting an approval. Some examples of types
of actions you can have in a flow include loops that run an action
until conditions are met to move to the
next step of the flow, a switch which
identifies a single case to execute that is based on
the evaluation of input, a do until that executes a block of actions until a
specific condition is true, an apply to each that executes a block of actions for each
item in the input array, and finally, expressions, which is an underlying
definition that describes the actual logic
that runs in your flow. It can be manually written. You can also perform
data operations in your flow such as compose, create CSV table, and join or select. With Power Automate, running a flow is different from running a flow in
a Power Apps app. Here, you perform the activity that
triggers the flow to run. Remember our email
trigger example? Instead of periodically
running the flow manually, it would automatically
run every time you receive a new email
with an attachment. This is because the flow has the trigger that determines
when it should run. Let's take a look at
different types of triggers. The first trigger can happen
when something changes. These are triggers that
run when data is changed. Examples are a new item
is created in SharePoint, a lead that is
updated in Dynamics, or when an event has been
deleted from Outlook. You can set up a flow to be
triggered on a schedule, at a certain time of a day
and with a recurrence. This allows for processes
such as checking every day at 8:00 AM to see if there are account renewal
spending and if so, sending an email to
the necessary people. A trigger on button press
can be used in many ways. This can be used when a flow virtual button is run
through the mobile app or a physical button
is clicked with third-party options or even when a button is pressed
inside of Power Apps. This gives you control
to run a flow on demand. You have explored flow
templates and triggers, time to see what more you can do with Power Automate.
See you soon.