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):

SharePoint screen for creating a new subsite

SharePoint: Spawn… urgh…
what rough beast is that, its hour come around at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born…


 
And here’s the home page of the new site:
Home screen of the newly created SharePoint site

It’s me! Sparkling new SharePoint subsite here, now modelling the modern look, totally ready to practice all your Flows

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:

SharePoint Designer screenshot 1

SharePoint Designer screenshot 1: Workflow to copy data to the consent form record

SharePoint Designer screenshot 2

SharePoint Designer screenshot 2: Workflow to copy data to the consent form record. Stage: Feedback Update

SharePoint Designer screenshot 3

SharePoint Designer screenshot 3: Workflow to copy data to the dissertation record.

SharePoint Designer screenshot 4

SharePoint Designer screenshot 4: Workflow to copy data to the dissertation record. Stage: Feedback Update

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:
    Screenshot: creating the drop-off library

    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:
    Screenshot of browser window showing many similar looking sharepoint tabs open

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

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

    Smiley face icon

    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

Share