Flow

Function Friday - Add, Sub, Mul, Div

One of the weakest areas for Power Automate’s functions is in the math and numbers area. For this week’s #FunctionFriday, I will delve into the first batch of math-related functions, I’m going to cover the basic 4: add (addition), sub (subtraction), mul (multiplication), and div (division). The pattern is basically the same for all of them: add(5.5, 6) //returns 11.5 sub(5.5, .5) //returns 5.0 mul(3, 3) //returns 9 div(9, 3) //returns 3 You have the function name and then two number parameters. And therein lies the most frustrating part of the functions. You can only pass two parameters. If you need to do math with more than two numbers, you have to call the function multiple times. Like so:

Friday, March 11, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Function Friday - Concat & Substring

For the first of my #FunctionFriday posts I’m going to focus on a couple of the most common string functions: concat and substring. concat The first function we’ll look at is concat. This function lets you glue together 2 or more other strings into a single string. The syntax is simple: concat(string 1, string 2, string 3) There isn’t a limit on the number of strings you can combine together, but you have to supply at least 2 arguments. These arguments can be any combination of literal strings, string variables, and string outputs from previous actions in the flow.

Friday, March 4, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Power Automate Connectors: Azure DevOps

One of the many useful connectors available in Power Automate is the connection to Azure DevOps. There is a wide variety of things you can do, including creating and updating tickets, responding to changes in ticket status, or responding to build events or code check-ins. In this post I’ll walk through a couple of examples related to interacting with Azure DevOps. Scenario 1: Creating a work item One of the more useful examples is the ability to quickly create a work item in response to some trigger. In this particular case, we’ll use a Microsoft Form to provide our clients a means of reporting bugs that we’ll use to trigger the creation of a bug in DevOps.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Power Automate - Expression Functions

While it’s fantastic to be able to use Power Automate to connect to hundreds of different systems to move data from place to place, one of the most powerful features of Power Automate are the functions you can use in expressions to manipulate data. Over the coming weeks, each friday I’ll take a deeper dive into various functions and how they work. But for this first post, I’ll provide a high level overview of expression functions and their use in Power Automate.

Friday, February 25, 2022 | 6 minutes Read

Auto-delete Gmail Promotion Emails

Cleaning up junk mail is an ongoing tribulation. Gmail does a pretty good job of identifying emails that are promotional in nature and flagging them as such. But over time those promo emails can eat up your email space and leave you with a mess to clean up. Thankfully, Power Automate can help us keep those promotions emails in check. Creating Our Trigger Unfortunately, the Gmail connector for Power Automate doesn’t let you list emails in your mailbox. The only thing you can do is react when a new email arrives. So while it won’t help you clean up your existing mess, we can set up a flow to deal with the new emails going forward. For this flow, we’re going to select the Gmail “When a new email arrives” trigger.

Saturday, February 5, 2022 | 3 minutes Read

Did You Know? Automating a Daily Factoid

Final post for the year. Returning once more to Power Automate. This time we’re automating the posting of a random factoid from a spreadsheet to social media. This is similar to the other post I made that posts a random blog post from the archives. Creating Our Trigger We’ll start by creating a scheduled flow. How often you post will depend on how many items you have to select from. You want to avoid posting the same thing frequently, at least in my opinion anyway. For this one, I am posting a quick note about the various connectors available in Power Automate. Currently, there are more than 500 connectors available, so I’m going to post every other day. That’s enough content to go out over two years of regular social media posting. Longer, really, since we’re doing a random selection and there’s likely to be repetition along the way.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021 | 5 minutes Read

C# Advent 2021 - Using C# Code in Power Automate

This post is my contribution to the C# Advent 2021. Power Automate has a fantastic feature in preview that lets you add some C# code to your flows. It requires using a custom connector, so it’s limited to those with a license that allows that. There are also a number of other limitations which I’ll get into later. But it’s a start. Yeah, I know, if you want to use C#, why not use a Logic App or Azure Function? And that’s perfectly all right (and for production apps I’d go that route right now). But this is cool, so why not? I’ve blogged before about creating custom connectors in Power Automate. I glossed over the Code tab in that post, but now it’s time to return to it.

Monday, December 13, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

From the Archives - Re-posting Old Blog Posts

Photo by Lara Jameson from Pexels Once you’ve built up some content, one of the ways to keep your social media presence more active is to re-share your older blog posts. For long time followers, it can remind them of previous content. And it can help bring in new followers who didn’t see that content previously. If you’ve got a blog with an RSS feed that includes all of your content, then picking one at random to re-share is easy to accomplish with Power Automate.

Wednesday, November 24, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Creating a Custom Connector - Part II

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels In part I of this post, I demonstrated how to create a custom connector. Now, we’ll follow up with a short post on how to use that custom connector in a flow. Creating Our Flow We’ll start by creating a scheduled flow. We’ll run our flow at 9AM Eastern every day. custom-connector-ii-recurrence Now we’ll need to create an action based on our custom connector. There are a couple ways you can do so. You can search for the connector like you would any connector. But also, at the top of the action box, just below the search box is a row of tabs that categorize actions by general categories. One of those is labeled “Custom”. If you click there, you will see any custom connectors you have created. For our flow we’ll select our “My NASA API Connector” connector, and the “Retrieve Astronomy Picture of the Day” as our action.

Sunday, November 21, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

Creating a Custom Connector - Part I

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels For those with the higher tier licenses, along with being able to use the premium connectors, you also have the ability to create your own custom connectors that you can use to connect to just about any API on the web. For our fun project this time, we’re going to take the next two blog posts to create a custom connector that makes use of the NASA public APIs in order to grab the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) and then we will create a flow that runs daily to post that day’s picture in a tweet to our Twitter feed.

Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

AI Builder: Training an Object Recognition Model

Last time we looked at identifying information on an invoice. Another feature AI Builder in Power Automate offers is the ability to recognize objects in an image. This time we’re going to look at how to set up AI Builder to identify dice. It should be noted that AI Builder is a paid add-on to Power Automate and does incur an extra cost to use. However, a free trial is available. See the Microsoft Power Automate site for more info. Getting Started Invoice processing required that you gather at least 6 samples of each invoice that you wanted to train the model for. Object identification requires quite a bit more. For training, you will need a minimum of 15 images for each object that you want to identify, plus additional images for testing. Ideally, however you will want at least 50 images of each object.

Monday, November 15, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

AI Builder: Training a Invoice Processing Model

One of the more complex features of Power Automate is the ability to train it to pull data out of scanned images of invoices and automatically import the information. I included a walkthrough of how to get started with this feature in my recent conference talk at Summit NA 2021, but I felt it would be beneficial to provide it in blog form as well. It should be noted that AI Builder is a paid add-on to Power Automate and does incur an extra cost to use. However, a free trial is available. See the Microsoft Power Automate site for more info. Getting Started The first thing you are going to need to get started is to gather at least 6 images of each format of invoice you intend to automate. You will need at least 5 images of each type to use to train the AI model to recognize where to find the data being sought from the invoice. The rest of the sample images will be used to test the model once it’s trained. If you’re looking for example invoices to use for learning purposes, the Microsoft AI Builder documentation includes 2 versions of invoices you can use for this purpose. Or you can use real invoices that you have around.

Sunday, November 7, 2021 | 9 minutes Read