Power Automate is the new-ish name for a product that you may have heard of sometime back – Microsoft Flow. It was given a new name back in November of 2019 so that it was more obvious to users that it was part of the Power Platform, and, therefore, gets all of the integrations and security that is expected from that suite of products.
Power Automate is a orchestration tool that will make things happen whenever a specified action happens. For example, if you would like to email yourself all tweets that include a specific hashtag – in this example, we’ll use #sqlfamily ( an extremely active hashtag on Twitter).
To start, we would go to the Power Automate website – https://flow.microsoft.com/
From here, you will click Create on the left side – and you can choose from one of the thousands of templates that already exist or you can start from a blank area.
In this case, I’ll be starting from a blank area to build an automated flow.
Now, we’re asked one of the harder questions of the day – What should the name of our new process be?
In this case, I’m going to name it SQL Family Tweets.
Then I’ll pick out my trigger – which thankfully I can search for “twitter” because it would take a while to scroll through the entire list.
Then we get the next step – our first step in the automation!
We need to set our search text to be our hashtag that we’re interested in – mainly because it’s a requirement of the step. And move on to the next step!
Since the idea is to send an email, we’re going to select Office 365 Outlook as our connector and the action would be to send an email.
Please remember to specify the email you want to send the email to.
Where this gets really cool, in my opinion, is the dynamic content that you can add to the subject or body of the email.
You can specify exactly which portions of the tweet you want to see. In my case, I want to see the name of the user who sent the tweet and what they tweeted.
I set that up as follows:
Once that is done, then I’m actually done with the entire process! I can hit the save button or the test button to see it in action.
As soon as the next #SQLFamily tweet comes in
There are literally thousands of things you can do to automate your work life (and probably even more for your personal life). Power Automate gives you the tools and connectors to help you out. The only thing you have to do is figure out what needs to be done.
Next time, we’ll go into the newest of the Power Platform products – Power Virtual Agents! Until next time my friends!