Flow / PowerAutomate – Annabel Treshansky's Blog

A row of white doors with one yellow door

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Recently I’ve been working on a Power App for academic and teaching office staff to organise feedback on postgraduate dissertations. Microsoft recommend a maximum of 30 connectors per Power App, so I decided to pass the course codes to Power Automate, where a Switch action could be used to choose which course’s SharePoint lists to read data from.

This is how I had set that up in Power Automate:

The Switch statement compares the course code passed in from Power Apps with text strings providing the code for each course. It should match one of them and then follow that course of action. But it didn’t. The two seemingly identical strings didn’t match, and the flow ran into the default (matching none) condition instead.

Two road signs pointing to the same location in opposite directions

Confusing road sign at Elan Village
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Chris Henley – geograph.org.uk/p/265977

Mar 13, 2024

Screenshot: Adding a new list item in Teams

Copying Files, Flows, a Plan, SharePoint Lists and a Notebook from one Microsoft Team to another

By Annabel Treshansky

On 31st March 2021

In Flow / PowerAutomate, Office 365, Organisation, SharePoint, Teams, Useful Tips, Why, God, Why??

Reading Time: 13 minutes

First thing on the list: get organised!

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a University document called the New Learning Technologist Development Toolkit. And so I began a new project to follow it and develop my skills in Learning Technology. Obviously a project like this needed some way over the top organising… 😁

A while ago, I developed my own Microsoft Team called ‘Team of Me’, for organising myself and bringing my notes and notifications together in lockdown. This seemed like a good place to organise my training plans, so at first I created a channel in this Team to collect resources for this new project.

I began setting up a plan in Planner, creating lists of links, collecting PDF resources, making a few notes in the OneNote notebook and setting up some helpful Flows to channel messages into the right places, and cheer my progress along.

However, I soon discovered that the New Learning Technologist Toolkit, which looked like a short PDF, was actually a lot bigger than I’d thought. Everything it mentioned sent me down another rabbit hole of links and documents, and I realised it would need several channels in its own right to organise it all.

In fact, I began to suspect that becoming a Learning Technologist would take a lot longer than the 4 weeks listed after all. Who knew🙄. And so I decided to set my project up in a new Team of its own, which I’ve called ‘My New Learning Technologist Toolkit Team’.

The challenge now was to copy across the content I had collected and created in my original Teams channel into this new team.

Mar 31, 2021

Day 1 of Microsoft 365 Global Developers’ Bootcamp: Getting Set Up with Teams, SharePoint and other Microsoft Accounts

By Annabel Treshansky

On 6th November 2020

In Flow / PowerAutomate, Microsoft 365, Office 365, Organisation, SharePoint, Teams

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Recently I had the great opportunity of attending the Microsoft 365 Global Developers’ Bootcamp. This consisted of two workshops, each going through a series of activities around a themed task, developing applications for use with Microsoft Teams, and using the Microsoft Graph API.

The workshop for Day 1 was ‘Build an Emergency Response Solution with Teams and SharePoint’.

This workshop was run by Bob German, and it took us through a series of tasks to create a Teams app for coordinating the response to an emergency such as a natural disaster. It grew out of work done to help with the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in Asia.

Nov 6, 2020

Using Flow with Teams, part 2

By Annabel Treshansky

On 3rd April 2020

In Collaborative Software, Flow / PowerAutomate, SharePoint, Teams

Reading Time: 19 minutes

Recap

This is a follow on from my previous post, ‘Using Microsoft Flow to update a Teams group with SharePoint activity‘. Flow is also known as Power Automate, and it is a Microsoft method for connecting apps so that outputs from one app can become inputs to another app, and events that happen in one app can trigger procedures in another app.

In my previous post, I added Flow to a Microsoft Teams group, and set up conditional testing to post a message in one of two Teams channels, depending on the value chosen in a metadata column when a file was uploaded to a SharePoint library belonging to the Team.

The Plan

The next steps to improve on this Flow will be:

Changing the SharePoint column name to ‘Relevance’ and the option labels, Teams channel names and Flow conditions to say ‘Urgent’ and ‘FYI’ rather than ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Never’. This morphed into the far more complicated problem of waiting for the SharePoint column value to change before continuing the Flow.
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In the message that’s posted to Teams, change the text displaying the uploaded file’s URL to a working link to the file.
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Post the message in Teams using the name of the person who uploaded the file to SharePoint.
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Another thing I would like to do is to add the updates as cards in ‘To Do’ columns in the Teams group Trello board.
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Summary: Bringing the last few things together. Jump to summary section
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Apr 3, 2020

Using Microsoft Flow to update a Teams group with SharePoint activity

By Annabel Treshansky

On 29th March 2020

In Flow / PowerAutomate, SharePoint, Teams, Useful Tips

Reading Time: 6 minutes

I resumed my progress with Microsoft Flow after a pointless side quest attempting to change my favicon in SharePoint. I had very little success there, though I learned a lot, but with this, thankfully, I am having better luck.

To get started, I watched some of a video course on LinkedIn Learning: Microsoft Power Automate: Beyond the Basics, with Gini von Courter. I’ve watched enough of these now that I find Gini quite calming and pleasant to listen to: it’s a no nonsense way to get back in the frame of mind for the Microsoft universe (which is like the Marvel universe, but kind of solid, unmoving and heavy).

As it turned out, this course was ideal for me, because I’d already set up a Teams group for my current project and Gini started off with adding Microsoft Flow to Teams. Being quite new to Microsoft Teams, I hadn’t thought of doing that before, but it does make a lot of sense and offers some useful opportunities worth practising.

Mar 29, 2020