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Power Automate: Sending Emails Using Excel Data

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Ian Hayse

Recently, a user asked me how they could send emails using a flow, with Excel as the data source. I’m going to provide an in-depth guide that covers every step needed to accomplish this.

What’s needed to follow along:
Access to a Power Platform environment
URL: https://make.powerautomate.com/
OneDrive (but you can use SharePoint)
Excel file

Open a new Excel file and populate it with the following columns:
RowID, Employee Name, Manager Email, Email Sent
Enter data in each of the cells, but ensure that RowID has a unique value for each row.

After the data is entered, you will want to create a table encompassing the cells that were just populated. With one of the cells selected, click the Insert tab at the top of the file, then click Table.

When the Create Table popup opens, ensure it includes the rows and columns you created, and the my tables has headers box should be checked. Click Ok to close the popup.

From the File tab, click Save As and save the file to a OneDrive location. You can save the file to your desktop or another location, then copy it to a folder in OneDrive. It makes no difference how the file gets there, but for this flow to work, it needs to be in OneDrive or a SharePoint location you have access to.

From a browser, navigate to https://make.powerautomate.com/. On the left side of the screen, click on My flows. After the page refreshes, click + New flow and select Instant cloud flow.

In the Flow name field, input a name for your flow. From the Choose how to trigger this flow, select Manually trigger a flow, then click the Create button.

In the flow design canvans, click the + below the Manually trigger a flow action, and select Add an action.

When the Add an action window opens on the left side of the screen, you will notice that you have a bunch of actions to choose from. The first box can be used to search for actions; here, enter Excel list rows. Note how the actions are grouped by the connector type, in our case, Excel Online. The other key to note here is to see more blue text to the right of the Excel Online group. If you don’t see the action you are looking for, always remember to click the see more link. Doing this will disable all available actions for the group. Go ahead and click on the List rows present in a table action.

From the Location dropdown, select OneDrive if that’s where you saved your file; else, select SharePoint or wherever you saved the file. For this example, the file must be in a storage location to which the flow can connect. Next, click the dropdown for the Document Library. In my example, you’ll notice that I have several options to choose from; if you get the same result, you’ll need to select each option and then click the File dropdown to see if you are in the correct location. Yes, it’s annoying.

Once you have the correct Document Library selected, click the dropdown for the File option, navigate to where your Excel file is stored, and select it.

From the Table dropdown, select the available option. In my example, the only table from the Excel file is Table2. There is a good chance yours is named something else.

You can verify the table name by returning to your Excel file, clicking the Table Design tab, and then noting the Table Name value.

Returning to the flow design canvas, click the + Add an action below the Excel action.

From the search box, enter send email. With the list of actions narrowed down, select the Send an email (v2) option. If you are reading this in the future, the option might (V_something else), but make sure you are in the Office 365 Outlook group of action. Do NOT use the action from the Mail group.

In the Send an email action, click in the To field. If the dynamic content is not visible, click the Enter custom value text and the little lightning bolt icon.

When the dynamic content window opens, you will see a few options for fields you can select to populate the To value of the Send an email action. From the list of options, select Manager Email. This will pull in the manager’s email from the spreadsheet.

Click in the Subject field and enter some text; here, you will notice I input Example. After you’ve entered some text, click the lightning bolt icon again, but this time select Employee Name.

The last thing we will populate in this action is the Body of the email. Again, feel free to input some text here, and like the other fields, you can use values from the dynamic content menu to use values from the Excel file.

The completed email action will look like this.

You will notice that a For each was automatically added to the flow design canvas. Why? If you think about what the flow is doing from a process standpoint, it added the For each to loop over each row in the Excel file. For each row in the spreadsheet, do ____. In our example, it will send an email, and each email will reference the current item in the loop.

Below the Send an email action, click + Add an action.

From the add an action search box, enter excel update row, and select the Update a row action. We will use this action to update the spreadsheet for each email sent.

In the Update a row action, navigate to where your Excel file is stored. The steps you followed when connecting to the file a few steps back in this process will apply here. Once you’ve connected to the file, click in the Key Column and select RowID from the available choices.

Click into the Key Value field, open the dynamic content window, and select RowID. We are telling the action that we want to update the Excel file row corresponding to the current item in For each loop.

Click the dropdown for the Advanced parameters field and select Email Sent. I entered Yes in the Email Sent field.

The completed flow should look like this: We trigger the flow, get the table from the Excel file, loop over each row in the table (for each), send an email, and update the spreadsheet for each item in the loop.

At the top of the screen, click Save, then Test

Select Manually when the next window opens, click Continue, and last but not least, click Run flow.

When the flow is finished running, you should see green check marks next to each flow action.

The emails were sent to each manager with their employee in the subject and body of each email. To test sending emails, I like to use https://temp-mail.org/en/

Navigating back to the Excel file, the Email sent value is Yes for each row in the file.

That’s it! There are lots of steps, but I hope it covers everything you need to create a workflow that does the exact same thing.

Build Your Own ChatGPT-Style App Using Power Automate and Power Apps

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Ian Hayse

Just for fun, I wanted to see how I could replicate a basic ChatGPT like experience using the tools available to me in the Power Platform. I will cover setting up the Power Automate flow to interface the OpenAI completions endpoint using GPT-4 Turbo and a Power App for the UI. In a future post, I will create another flow(s) to work with the Assistants API and take this to the next level.

A quick look at the app and how it works. The app will keep the chat context active using the completions endpoint until you want to clear it out. Like I said, it’s basic!

Here is what I used to get this up and running:
Power App
Power Automate flow with the HTTP connector
OpenAI account
OpenAI API key (credit card required)

Here is the layout of the flow and Power App

The key for this to work and keep the context of the conversation flowing is to pass all of the previous questions and responses back to the API each time a new question is asked. Yes, that can start to add up in terms of burning a lot of tokens for a large chat.

The input is converted to the following format and passed to the API using the app.
role: user
content: question asked
The response from the API is the same.
role: assistant
content: response from the API
Using the two, the collection is built and displayed in a gallery.

Power App setup –
ButtonQuestion OnSelect property does the following:
Set the button text
Set the varQuestion variable to the value of TextInputQuestion
Add the question and user role to the colResponses collection
Convert the colResponses collection to JSON
Cal the f Get HTTP flow passing in the collection
with the response from the flow, add the value(s) to the colResponses collection
Reset TextInputQuestion
Set the button text

GalleryRespnses properties:
Visible: If(IsBlank(ThisItem.content),false,true)
Text: ThisItem.content
X: If(ThisItem.role = “assistant”,40,5)
AutoHeight: true

Now for the flow! The flow is triggered from the app and passes a value.
Messages: the new question from the app and previous responses and questions (collection)

The Parse JSON action will take the Messages input and shape the JSON used in the Select Messages action.

The Select Messages action will use the output of the Parse JSON action to help form the correct input for the HTTP action.

Using a Compose action, the model and messages values are set. Note: in the example, I’m using GPT 4 Turbo preview.

The HTTP Request action uses the following values:
Method: Post
URL: https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions
Headers:
{
“Content-Type”: “application/json”,
“Authorization”: “Bearer @{outputs(‘Compose_API_Key’)}”
}
Body: output of the Compose Message Body

Another Parse JSON action is used to handle the response from the HTTP Request.

In the Select Response action, the output of Parse JSON Response is used to populate the role and content values.

The final action is to respond to the Power App. The respond to PowerApp step will not work if you use the dynamic content value to populate the response. You must use this expression: outputs(‘Select_Response’)

Again, if data is not sent back to the Power App, chances are you missed the sentence before this one.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is a basic example. If you see anything wrong with the process or places where it could be streamlined, please let me know.

How do you find ALL the Flows that reference a SharePoint site or list?

Posted on April 13, 2023 by Ian Hayse

I asked this question when I first started down the path of learning about Flow:
How do you find all the Flows running on or referencing a SharePoint list?

UPDATE / EDIT – READ THIS Part
Before you start on this, please ensure that your account or the account you are using to run the script has sufficient permissions to the target environment(s).

$oneFlow = Get-AdminFlow -FlowName "00000-ae95-4cab-96d8-0000000" -EnvironmentName "222222-4943-4068-8a2d-11111111"

$refResources = $oneFlow.Internal.properties.referencedResources
Write-Host $refResources

If you run that command and look at the returned properties and see an error, that means you do not have the correct permissions to move forward. You can check your permissions in the Power Platform admin center: https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/

/end of update

Think about it: someone in your company creates a Flow that runs when a SharePoint item is updated. Fast forward a year or so, and that coworker has moved on, and the Flow needs to be updated. If you work for a small company or one that hasn’t fallen in love with Power Platform and Flow, you’re likely in luck, and finding the Flow will take a few minutes. In my case, there are currently 2,712 Flows in my tenant that span several environments.

The PowerShell script I’ve created will query a tenant using the Get-AdminFlow command, return all Flows, and then loop through them. The script can be adjusted to target a single environment using the EnvironmentName parameter. Note: running the script using the Get-Flow action will return all the Flows your AD account can access.

#Install-Module AzureAD
#Install-Module -Name Microsoft.PowerApps.Administration.PowerShell  
#Install-Module -Name Microsoft.PowerApps.PowerShell -AllowClobber 

#connect-AzureAD

function Get-UserFromId($id) {
    try {
        $usr = Get-AzureADUser -ObjectId $id
        return $usr.displayName
    }
    catch {
        return $null
    }
}

#get all flows in the tenant
$adminFlows = Get-AdminFlow 

#set path for output
$Path = "$([Environment]::GetFolderPath('Desktop'))\Flow_Search_for_SharePoint_$(Get-Date -Format "yyyyMMdd_HHmmss").csv"

#set target site
$targetSPSite = "https://yourTenant.sharepoint.com/sites/yourSITE"
$targetSPList = "4f4604d2-fa8f-4bae-850f-4908b4708b07"
$targetSites = @()

foreach ($gFlow in $adminFlows) {

    #check if the flow references the target site
    $refResources = $gFlow.Internal.properties.referencedResources | Where-Object { $_.resource.site -eq $targetSPSite }

    #check if the flow references the target list
    #$refResources = $gFlow.Internal.properties.referencedResources | Where-Object { $_.resource.list -eq $targetSPList }

    if ($refResources -ne $null) {

        #optional - get the user who created the Flow
        $createdBy = Get-UserFromId($gFlow.internal.properties.creator.userId)

        $row = @{}
        $row.Add("EnvironmentName", $gFlow.EnvironmentName)
        $row.Add("Name", $gFlow.DisplayName)
        $row.Add("FlowEnabled", $gFlow.Enabled)
        $row.Add("FlowGUID", $gFlow.FlowName)
        $row.Add("CreatedByUser", $createdBy)
        $row.Add("CreatedDate", $gFlow.CreatedTime)
        $row.Add("LastModifiedDate", $gFlow.lastModifiedTime)
        
        $targetSites += $(new-object psobject -Property $row)
    }
}

#output to csv
$targetSites | Export-Csv -Path $Path -NoTypeInformation

If you don’t want to get the display name of the user who created the Flow, comment out the part of the script that calls the Get-UserFromId function, and you won’t need to connect to Azure.

And to answer my original question: How do you find all the Flows running on or referencing a SharePoint list?
In the script, comment out the part of the script that references $targetSPSite and un-comment $targetSPList. You can get the GUID of the list by navigating to list settings and looking at the URL. Another option is to open the list, view the Page Source, then look for the “listId” property.

In a future post(s), I will outline how to search for all Flows that use different connectors, Dynamics 365 tables (dataverse), triggered from Power Apps, or other objects. All of the info is in the properties of the Flow; getting to it can be a little fun.

How to run a Databricks Notebook using Power Automate

Posted on November 8, 2022 by Ian Hayse

Part of a project I was working on required mashing up some data from SharePoint with data stored in datalake. We settled on creating a Databricks notebook to read an input file, query data lake using the input file, and then export an enriched file.

Here’s a high-level overview of what’s going to be created:

Call the notebook, parse the JSON response, loop until the notebook has finished, then respond to the notebook’s output.

In my case, triggering the notebook will require knowing its URL, bearer token, job id, and input parameters.

Parse the response from the HTTP call:

The notebook will take a little time to spin up, then process the input file. The best way to handle this is to leverage a basic do-until loop to check the status of the notebook job. I opted to use a one-minute delay, call the API to get the job status, parse the response, then evaluate if it’s finished.

One thing to note about the do until action, you don’t want it to run for eternity, and to avoid adding complexity to it, you don’t want to add extra evaluations like: if looped X times, stop
If you expand the Change limits option, you can set how many times it loops or change the duration. Here I’ve set the action to stop looping after 20 tries. For more info on this, please check SPGuides for a detailed overview.

The last step in the flow is to process the response from the notebook. If the job is success(full), get the file from blob storage and load it to SharePoint; otherwise, create a Slack alert.

That’s it; using the example above, you can trigger a Databricks notebook using a Flow.

Authentication
When I set this up, my company allowed the use of Personal Access Tokens (PAT).
https://docs.databricks.com/dev-tools/auth.html#pat
The PAT was then used in the Flow to trigger the notebook.

Use Power Automate to Create Jira Tasks

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Ian Hayse

I’m working on a Power Pages project that requires a Jira service desk task to be created for each portal submission. Out of the box, Jira provides a simple connector to create tasks and requests, but the connect falls short of handling field types other than simple text. This means choice, checkbox, and dropdown fields are not available. This only leaves a couple of options, and I opted to use a simple HTTP action to create the tasks.

Basic overview of what I’ll be creating:
Flow that’s triggered by a dataverse row creation
Create a Jira task and populate metadata
Attach a file to the Jira task

Jira fields and types:
Issue Type – Choice
Request Type – Choice
Tortilla – Choice
Meat – Choice
Veggies – Checkbox multi-select
Number of Tacos – Number
Pickup Date Time – Date and Time
Summary – Text
Attachment – Attachment

Interfacing with the Jira API requires knowing a little about the fields you’ll be updating and the project and issue type you want to use. If you haven’t created one already, you need a Jira API token to work with the API.

Request type:
Go to Project Settings, then look at the URL and copy the value after pid=
https://taco.atlassian.net/secure/project/EditProject!default.jspa?pid=10001

With the ID, you can query the service desk request-types endpoint
https://taco.atlassian.net/rest/servicedesk/1/servicedesk/request/10001/request-types
In the returned payload, note the portal key and key values; combine the two, and you have the request type value tr/9f7c4029-6d23-4cb1-bb8a-02d0050d944b

Project key:
The project key is available on the project settings page, listed under the name field.
Example: TACOS

Issue type:
For simplicity, I’m only dealing with one issue type, and I captured the issueType value using the request-types endpoint noted above.
Example: “issueType”: 10015

For the remaining field values, you can get them in one of two ways.
Create a new issue in the browser, then use the browser developer tools (F12 or Ctrl + Shift + I) to inspect each field’s HTML value.

The other option is to click the gear icon (top right), select Issues, click on Custom Fields, search for a field, click on it, click Edit detail, and then grab the ID value from the URL. Once the ID is captured, join it with customfield_, resulting in customfield_10073, which is the field’s internal value.

In this example, the summary issue type fields are the only ones that do not have a customfield_X naming convention. It might be possible that some system-generated fields have a different naming convention, but I’ll dig into that another day.

Column Display Name	Column Internal Name	Column Type
Issue Type	issuetype	system
Request Type	customfield_10010	system
Tortilla	customfield_10073	Select List (single)
Meat	customfield_10074	Select List (single)
Veggies	customfield_10075	Checkboxes
Number of Tacos	customfield_10076	Number Field
Pickup Date Time	customfield_10077	Date Time Picker
Summary	summary	system

Endpoint URL:
https://taco.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/issue/
Headers: {“Content-Type”: “application/json”}
Authentication: Raw
Key: Basic aWhddsfadfafa..NOT…A…REAL…KEY..dafdfdafd=
Example payload:

{
  "fields": {
    "project": {
      "key": "TACOS"
    },
    "customfield_10010": "tr/9f7c4029-6d23-4cb1-bb8a-02d0050d944b",
    "summary": "Taco order summary",
    "issuetype": {
      "id": "10015"
    },
    "customfield_10073": {"value": "Flour"},
    "customfield_10074": {"value": "Chicken"},
    "customfield_10075": [{"value": "Pico"},{"value": "Grilled Veggies"}],
    "customfield_10076": 2,
    "customfield_10077":"2022-11-05T11:05:00.000+0000"
  }
}

View of the task in Jira

How do you attach a file to a Jira task using Power Automate?
Attaching a file to a Jira task requires one more API call, and it’s simple!

Endpoint URL:
https://taco.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/issue/Key/attachments
Headers: {“X-Atlassian-Token”: “no-check”}
Authentication: Raw
Key: Basic aWhddsfadfafa..NOT…A…REAL…KEY..dafdfdafd=

Example payload:

{
  "$content-type": "multipart/form-data",
  "$multipart": [
    {
      "headers": {
        "Content-Disposition": "form-data; name=\"file\"; filename=@{outputs('Get_file_properties')?['body/{FilenameWithExtension}']}"
      },
      "body": @{body('Get_file_content')}
    }
  ]
}

Attachment
I’m getting a file from SharePoint and passing its contents to the API call for the attachment. The same thing works with Azure blob storage or grabbing a file from the dataverse. If you want to attach more than one file, create additional HTTP attachment calls.

Here’s a simple overview of the Flow:

Parse JSON schema:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "id": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "key": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "self": {
            "type": "string"
        }
    }
}

The Jira documentation is great, and the forums are active and helpful.

Power App Unable to add flow

Posted on August 22, 2022 by Ian Hayse

I was in the process of porting a production Power App to a dev environment, and I ran into this error.

Unable to add flow
There was a problem adding your service. Please try again later.

The problem was that I tried to add an existing Flow to my Power App, but it was turned off.

Navigate to make.powerapps.com, locate the Flow you are trying to add to the Power App, turn it on, then try adding to the app.

Create Dynamic Hyperlinks And Send An Email Action

Posted on July 29, 2022 by Ian Hayse

Over the years, some updates to Flow have been better than others, and others, not so much. If memory serves, the send an email action would use dynamic hyperlinks without much work, but something went sideways with one of the updates causing dynamic hyperlinks not to work as you’d want.

Here is a basic example of including a hyperlink in an outgoing email; further down the page, I’ll provide a more realistitc example.

In this example, I setup the Flow to trigger when an item is added to a SharePoint library. The key thing to note in this example is the value of the varHyerplink variable; note the double quotes around the link to item.

Use Power Automate to Update a SharePoint Person Field

Posted on June 2, 2022 by Ian Hayse

Using the SharePoint HTTP flow action to update a person or group field, I kept getting this error:

A 'PrimitiveValue' node with non-null value was found when trying to read the value of a navigation property; however, a 'StartArray' node, a 'StartObject' node, or a 'PrimitiveValue' node with null value was expected.

The field I was attempting to update is named Submitted By, with an internal name of Submitted_x0020_By. Each time I tried to update the field I was seeing the error noted above. It wasn’t until I looked at one of my previous flow runs did I notice what the issue was. It turns out, that the field name I should be using is Submitted_x0020_ById.

Update flow:

How do you update a Person field if the field allows for multiple selections? The example below will update the field with two different user values, but clearly, this could be extended to be more dynamic.

body('Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint_User_1')?['d']?['Id']
body('Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint_User_2')?['d']?['Id']

concat('[',outputs('Compose_1'),',',outputs('Compose_2'),']

{
    "__metadata": {
        "type":"SP.Data.AssignedToListListItem"
    },
    "SubmittedByIDsId": {
         "results": [
                 6,
                 54
          ]
    }
}

Power Automate Convert Time Zone Error

Posted on May 25, 2022 by Ian Hayse

I was in the middle of streamlining an old flow and needed to compare two dates and times. To simplify things, I opted to use the Convert time zone flow action, but it gave me an error that seemed a little odd.

Unable to process template language expressions for action ‘Convert_time_zone’ at line ‘0’ and column ‘0’: ‘The template language function ‘convert timezone’ expects its fourth parameter to be a string that contains a date time format. The provided value is of type ‘Null’. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#ConvertTimeZone for usage details.’.

Notice that I did not select an option for the Format string field, this is required, but there’s not a red * next to the field.

Select an option for that field, and the universe will be back in alignment.

Add Company Holidays to Your Outlook Calendar Using Power Automate

Posted on January 14, 2022 by Ian Hayse

Below are all the steps required to add your company holidays to your Outlook calendar. This is a simple approach that can easily be updated to pull the holidays and dates from other data sources like Exel, SharePoint, Dataverse…

Overview of the flow that will be created:

All of the holidays (events) will be stored in an array using a compose action.

[
{"Event":"Holiday - New Years","Date":"01/01/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - MLK Day","Date":"01/17/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Presidents Day","Date":"02/21/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Memorial Day","Date":"05/30/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Juneteenth Day","Date":"06/20/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Independence Day","Date":"07/04/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Labor Day","Date":"09/05/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Thanksgiving Day","Date":"11/24/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Day After Thanksgiving","Date":"11/25/2022"},
{"Event":"Holiday - Christmas Day","Date":"12/26/2022"}
]

After that, a parse JSON event will be used to make the events available in the apply to each action. Note: after the parse JSON action is added to the flow, click the generate from sample button and paste in the holidays JSON from the step above.

Next, add an apply to each action to the flow. In the action, the output box will hold the body of the parse JSON action.

The convert time zone action is used to standardize the date format. For the base time use the Date field from the parse JSON action.

The last item that needs to be added is the outlook create event action. Note: for the End time property a formula is used: addDays(body(‘Convert_time_zone’),1)

Save the flow and run it.

Edit/Update –
For the End time value, you can input this expression: addHours(body(‘Convert_time_zone’),23) . If you set Is all day event to Yes, you’ll need a timespan that covers most if not all of the day.
Also, if you want to set Is reminder on, it must be input as minutes, so 17 hours would be 1020 minutes.