Reading Time: 3 minutes

Having overcome (thank God) my initial stumbling block of all-consuming dread, I have begun building a practice site for using SharePoint document libraries and lists with Microsoft Flow (or PowerAutomate as I think it is now called).

Here I am setting it up as a subsite of my old training site from October (and yes I use the Lego theme, obvs):

 
And here’s the home page of the new site:

Not bad actually, quite reassuring looking with the modern look.

Now a couple of days ago my (poor long suffering) manager gave me ONE JOB: to replicate some simple SharePoint workflows from a system we had built a few months ago, using Flow / PowerAutomate.

Step 1: Overcoming the all-consuming dread

First I spent two days overcoming the all-consuming dread.

Here are my posts about that:

1. Google: What can you do when you’re dreading a big project at work?
2. SharePoint: Who can save us?

Step 2: Screenshots

Then I took some screenshots of the current SharePoint Workflow details in SharePoint Designer:

These are the steps I will take next:

1. Create 3 document libraries: drop off, consent forms, and dissertations library.
2. Create 2 SharePoint content types: consent forms and dissertations
3. Add these content types to their respective libraries
4. Can’t believe Boris Johnson is having a baby, urgh
5. Watch Gini von Courter’s new course, ‘Microsoft Power Automate: Beyond the Basics‘
6. Add a workflow to the drop off library to move uploaded documents to the correct libraries
7. Add a workflow to the dissertation library to copy missing data fields to the consent form record linked by matriculation ID
8. Add a corresponding workflow to the consent form library to copy missing data fields to the consent form record linked by matriculation ID

And here’s how that went:

1. Creating 3 document libraries:
   This started off quite well. Here’s an example of creating one of those:
   
   

   Creating the Drop-off Library. Any new documents will be uploaded here and routed by Flow.

2. Fatal Distraction.
   At this point, I started getting irritated with the enormous number of identical looking tabs that SharePoint opens:
   
   

   Too much, SharePoint, and it all looks the same!

   So I wanted to upload a favicon for my subsite. Like this:

   

   My favicon of choice, but bigger

   It’s maybe a 10 minute job to change it on ANY NORMAL WEBSITE. It’s also the subject of another blog post.

Links

• https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/geos/geos-dev/annabels-subsite/flow-site

Mar 7, 2020

Share