Power-Automate

New Video - Updated Intro to Power Automate

It felt like time to redo my Power Automate intro video.

Thursday, June 6, 2024 | 1 minute Read

Post A Message To Teams Chat

It’s long past time I had a new blog post. I’ve been focused so much lately on speaking opportunities and mentoring efforts that I haven’t posted much to my blog. So, here’s a new one I found useful a while back. Scenario In our scenario, we have a support email that gets emails when someone fills out a form on a website. The problem is that not much notice gets paid to the inbox and messages could go ignored for hours, or even days. We want to raise awareness of issues sooner so that appropriate actions can be taken. In this case, when we get an email, we’ll post a message into our Teams chat.

Thursday, April 25, 2024 | 4 minutes Read

How do I get started with Power Automate?

When I speak at conferences or user groups about Power Automate, one of the questions I get asked the most (aside from how to understand the confusing licensing), is how to get started with Power Automate, or the Power Platform in general. I thought I would write a post on the best ways to get started. Microsoft Learn In recent years Microsoft has invested heavily in creating free online training for a great many of their products. And most of that learning can be found on the Microsoft Learn site. The modules are the individual courses and the learning paths group several modules together into a cohesive learning track. For Power Automate, there are a few learning paths that I want to highlight.

Tuesday, February 6, 2024 | 5 minutes Read

Copilot for Power Automate

Tis the season of copilots! Everybody gets a copilot! Image by DCStudio on Freepik No, not that kind of copilot. I’m talking about the kind of copilot that runs off of AI and helps you to do some kind of task. You know, all the copilots that Microsoft has recently announced that are getting added to literally EVERYTHING.

Wednesday, November 29, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

My Favorite Podcasts & Video Channels for 2023

Every so often I update my list of favorite podcasts and video channels. These are the places I go to for learning and entertainment. It’s especially great to listen to while I’m driving since anymore radio is a desolate wasteland of 40 minutes of ads and 20 minutes of content most hours. But I also like to listen while I code, or work in the garage, or whatever it is that I’m doing at the moment.

Friday, May 5, 2023 | 5 minutes Read

Rockin' the Code World with Me!

Just in case you missed the live interview with me on Rockin’ the Code World, you can watch it below. Get the details here.

Monday, April 24, 2023 | 1 minute Read

Using C# and Power Automate To Sync An Outlook Calendar

There are some good tools out there for syncing your Outlook calendar to other calendars, especially for O365 or Outlook.com calendars. And they’re well worth the money for the good ones. But sometimes, in certain circumstances (such as if you have an on-prem exchange server that you can’t access from the cloud), you just need a quick and dirty tool to copy calendar events from a local Outlook instance to another calendar. That’s something you can do pretty quickly with a little C# and some Power Automate.

Friday, April 14, 2023 | 12 minutes Read

Automatically Adding Travel Time To Your Calendar

Even in this world of video meetings on Teams, Zoom, or wherever, there are still occasions when you need to travel to an onsite meeting somewhere. In these cases, it can be useful to automatically block out travel time before and after to ensure that your calendar reflects when you’re not going to be in the office. Power Automate makes it easy to add some travel time to your calendar.

Friday, March 10, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

Creating a Check-in Reminder App

This post was inspired by a recent tweet from Taylor Desseyn. app idea here.... a networking tool where instead of social media/linkedin you plug in a persons info and the app reminds you to check in with folks every 30 days — taylor desseyn (@tdesseyn) December 14, 2022 So what we’re going to do is create a pair of Power Platform tools to help us do exactly that. First, we’re going to need a Power App that we can use to maintain a list of people we want to keep in touch with. The second piece will create a scheduled flow in Power Automate that will run daily, determine who we need to catch up with, and then send us that list of people, along with quick links.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023 | 7 minutes Read

Festive Tech Calendar 2022

By the way, I contributed to this year’s Festive Tech Calendar with a video on how to use low-code automation solutions like Power Automate and IFTTT to automate your holiday season. Check out the video here: There’s a lot of great submissions. Go check them out!

Tuesday, December 6, 2022 | 1 minute Read

Using DALL-E and Power Automate To Create and Share Images

One big current trend, for good or ill, is AI-generated images. There are a number of services out there to generate these images and most of them have an API that you can hit against and which have various price points for that access. For our example today, we’ll use DALL-E 2, from OpenAI. Their introductory level gives you 50 free credits the first month and 15 free credits each month after that. One of the cool features of DALL-E 2 is that in addition to the ability to create new images from text suggestions, you can also upload an existing image and make edits to that based on your suggestions.

Friday, December 2, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

Function Friday - Chunk, Sort & Reverse

Power Automate has added a number of new expression functions and features recently. This time around I’ll take a look at three of those new functions: chunk, sort and reverse. Chunk The chunk function lets you break up strings or arrays into blocks of equal length. The format is as follows: chunk(<string>, <length>) chunk(<array>, <length>) The first parameter is the string or array you want to break apart. The second parameter is the length you want for each chunk. The result that is returned is an array of chunks. If the array or string doesn’t break apart evenly based on the requested length, the remainder will be in the last array element.

Friday, November 11, 2022 | 2 minutes Read