r/MicrosoftFlow

Hi Everyone, I’m fairly new here.. started learning Microsoft Flow recently and every automation starts simple…

Then suddenly:

nested conditions everywhere

confusing variables

broken triggers

microsoft office free download files triggering random folder automations

Mostly using it for organizing documents and WPS Office files right now.

Any tips for keeping flows clean/manageable early on? Thanx in advance

What is the best way (for a novice) to recreate email ‘alerts’ / notifications from ‘questions’ asked within a SharePoint online list, routed to the appropriate user by choice column? The user would then update the list with answers to the submitter’s question. I need to create views as well so the submitter can not see the internal back and forth with providing answers. I tried power automate using a switch but need the emails to link back to the list /questions that only apply to that team member (also thinking view here?)

My setup: flow triggers on “When a file is created or modified in a folder.” Every day, 3 files land in the same SharePoint folder around the same time. The flow fires once per file, so I get 3 instances running in parallel — all of them eventually pass my checks and all 3 end up calling my ADF pipeline.

I already have a Do Until loop inside that polls for all 3 files in that SharePoint folder and sets an AllFilesPresent boolean — but that’s a local variable, doesn’t persist across instances. So all 3 runs flip it to true independently and fire the pipeline.

I tried setting concurrency to 1 on the trigger so runs queue instead of going parallel, but that doesn’t actually help — they still all run through the logic sequentially and each one triggers the pipeline.

Is there a native Power Automate way to do this without needing an external list or flag file?

Hi all. I had a Power Automate flow that used to work that would send an email to IFTTT when a Teams meeting was starting to change the color of some smart lights I have:

When an event is starting soon
Calendar: Calendar
Look-ahead: 3 (minutes)
IF Location = Microsoft Teams Meeting
Send Email (V2)
Subject #meetingStart
Body: A meeting is starting
ELSE
Nothing

Recently Microsoft made a change so that Teams Meetings no longer have a Location of "Microsoft Teams Meeting" so my automation stopped running. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to recreate it. I guess I need to parse the event body to look for the Teams link, but I've been unable to figure that part out. Currently I have

When an event is starting soon
Calendar: Calendar
Look-ahead: 3 (minutes)
Get Event V(3)
Calendar: Calendar
id: id from previous step
HTML to Text
@outputs('Get_event_(V3)')?['body'] (this SHOULD be the event body from the previous step; however I don't see a Dynamic Content option for the event body, only the message body)
IF body('Html_to_text') CONTAINS https://teams.microsoft.com/meet
Send Email (V2)
Subject #meetingStart
Body: A meeting is starting
ELSE
Nothing

But it doesn't ever fire so I have no idea what part i have wrong. Copilot is no help; it suggests trying something which never works.

Hi,

I have "when a new email arrives in a shared mailbox (V2) set up as a trigger. It has a trigger condition limiting it to email addresses with my company's domain. It has a subject filter with a word that is in all the arriving email subjects.

The flow consistently runs when I send an email to the shared box, but doesn't run at all or inconsistently for others. Several of those others also have full control permissions so it can't be that.

Hey,

I’ve been working with Power Platform full-time and freelancing for like 5.5 years, focused entirely on enterprise-level projects — most of my work has been with organizations of 200+ users across healthcare, manufacturing, finance, real estate, government, and more.

Over that time I’ve delivered a lot of solutions that actually moved the needle for clients, so I’ll share some real examples instead of just listing skills.

Some of what I’ve built:
Enterprise HR & Operations Portal (Power Pages + Dataverse)
External-facing portal for a large organization where employees, contractors, and managers each had different roles and access levels. Built on Dataverse with a complex security model — row-level security, business units, and custom API integrations pulling data from their ERP.
The client went from a fully manual process to a self-service system handling hundreds of requests per day.

Multi-Stage Procurement Approval System (Power Automate + Teams)
Full approval lifecycle for a manufacturing company — requisitions, budget checks, department head sign-off, finance review, and final authorization. Built with parallel branching, delegation logic, timeout handling, and full audit trail in Dataverse. Replaced a process that was running on emails and spreadsheets for years.

AI-Powered Document Processing (AI Builder + Power Automate)
Automated invoice and document intake for a finance client. AI Builder handled extraction, Power Automate handled routing and validation, and everything landed clean in Dataverse with zero manual entry. Cut processing time from days to under an hour.

Large-Scale Automation Overhaul (300+ flows)
Worked with a retail group that had a chaotic mix of legacy flows nobody fully understood. Audited, rebuilt, and restructured the entire automation layer — proper naming conventions, environment strategy, ALM with pipelines, and error handling that actually notifies the right people when something breaks.

Custom Connector + Third-Party API Integration
Built custom connectors for clients integrating with systems outside the Microsoft ecosystem — payment gateways, logistics APIs, government data services. Clean OAuth2 flows, proper error handling, and documented for internal teams to maintain.

A few things I’ve learned building at this scale:

•	Environment strategy and ALM are not optional on enterprise projects. They save you from yourself six months in.  
•	Dataverse security models need to be designed before a single table is created, not after the app is half built.  
•	Power Pages is seriously underused. For client-facing or partner portals it’s one of the strongest tools in the stack.  
•	AI Builder has matured enough to use in production. Stop sleeping on it.

I’m currently available for freelance projects.
If you’re building something complex, migrating off legacy systems, or just stuck on something that should work but doesn’t — I’d be glad to talk.
DM me or drop a comment. I’m also happy to answer technical questions here.

curious what prompting approach or formatting works best in real scenarios.

After 5.5 years building and fixing Power Automate flows across enterprise projects, the same mistakes show up over and over. Not beginner mistakes — mistakes that experienced people make because they work fine until they don't.

1. No error handling whatsoever Most flows are built assuming everything will work. No try/catch scope, no failure branch, no notification when something breaks. The flow just silently fails and nobody knows until someone complains that nothing happened.

2. Testing only the happy path Everyone tests when the approver approves. Nobody tests what happens when the approver is on leave, rejects with no comment, or their license expires. Edge cases are where flows die.

3. Hardcoded values everywhere Emails, URLs, IDs, and environment-specific values buried inside actions. The moment you move from dev to production or someone changes a mailbox, the whole flow breaks and you spend an hour hunting down where that value was hardcoded.

4. No concurrency control on loops Apply to each runs in parallel by default. If you're writing to a SharePoint list or updating a record inside a loop without controlling concurrency, you'll get race conditions and duplicate or missing data.

5. Connections tied to one person's account Built the flow using your personal connection? The moment that person leaves the company or changes their password, every flow using that connection dies. Use service accounts.

6. No documentation Six months later nobody — including the person who built it — knows what the flow does, why certain conditions exist, or what that specific expression was supposed to handle.

Most of these take five minutes to fix during development and hours to debug in production.

If you're working on a Power Automate project and want a second pair of eyes, or need something built properly from the start. DM me.

I've been using AI to try to build this flow, but I just give up.

TL;DR: I want to make a flow that reads a ~2,000 page document that groups and exports based on the Claim Control Number (upper right hand corner--here is a sample). I want the PDF to be named after said Claim Control Number. The groups are not a set number of pages.

Long version:
Every month, my company prints Defectives reports for vendors. My team splits the work based on the first letter of the vendor's name (I'm D-J). We sort through our stacks by hand, then scan them BACK IN. This is a complete waste of time and paper.

The list of defectives vary by length for each vendor, obviously. You can group the pages based on vendor number (upper left) OR you can see a TOTAL on the last page of each report. The claim number changes every month (This month is 20260430DEF- but next month will be 20260531DEF-). I want to put the file in a folder, run my flow, then it outputs my file for me. (Then we have to upload to each vendor's website individually... :/ no Sharepoint access.)

https://preview.redd.it/m554ogplga1h1.png?width=1586&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ff1d7097776140212b5b242f0270a990b15d5f4

Ultimately, I'd like to create a flow for every type of report we give to our vendors. But that's for another time. I consider myself moderately tech-savvy, but this is kicking my butt. ANY help at all is greatly appreciated!

Olá, tenho uma demanda que consome muito tempo do meu trabalho. Sou responsável por receber e planilhar documentos em PDF de prestadores terceirizados (atestados médicos, treinamentos de segurança como NR-10, NR-35, etc...) e isto consome muito do meu tempo, pois tenho que lançar esses dados diariamente numa planilha do Excel para controle de vencimentos. Seria possível automatizar a extração de dados? Um dado importante é que os PDFs não vem num de lay-out por se tratar de diversas empresas diferentes.

Agradeço a ajuda.

The "Flow" era is evolving. Welcome to the "Agent-First" era. 🤖

I’ve just spent some time with the brand-new Copilot Studio Workflow Interface, and it’s clear: Microsoft is moving us toward a massive shift in development experience.

It’s no longer just about linear steps; it’s about a tightly integrated UI where Prompts, Agents, and Microsoft 365 Copilot live together. This makes building sophisticated, grounded workflows significantly faster.

I have a long list of tasks in a Sharepoint List that need to reoccur each month, quarter, or year, depending on the task.

Is there a way to have a master list that Power Automate pulls from, checks the date, and creates a new task for the next period? I don't really want to have to create individual automations for each task as there is probably 100 of them.

I have an Accounts Payable business request for a flow that will work in a shared mailbox and auto forward to other emails based on the vendor name.
I've setup an AI Builder to extract vendor name from an attachment and do a hard coded routing but need some guidance on the next steps.

The vendor name needs to reference a master data list i.e. Vendor = Contoso then send to AP@Mail.com, Vendor = Contoso UK then send to APUK@mail.com etc

I'm thinking a SharePoint master data list where you add/update the vendor and email but feel like there should be a more elegant way to do this?

Anyone built or seen any build guides for something like this?

Can I automate a repetitive task that I have to do in order to get a task done, for example it's mostly clicking a few buttons throughout the process and doing that for hours!

I’m trying to automate a workflow for a property maintenance company and could use some advice from people experienced with n8n/Power Automate.
Current workflow:

- Work orders come into Outlook emails
- Some details are in the email body
- Some are inside attached PDFs
- We need the data automatically entered into an - - - - Excel sheet used for scheduling
- The company already heavily relies on Excel, so switching databases right now isn’t ideal

We’ve been trying:
Outlook → AI Parsing → Excel

But we’re running into issues like:
- inconsistent email formats
- PDF extraction problems
- Excel append failures
- table/column mapping issues
- Outlook body content sometimes getting truncated

Questions:

1. What’s the most reliable way to automate Outlook → Excel workflows for real-world messy emails?
2. Is n8n or Power Automate better for this use case?
3. How do you handle PDFs attached to Outlook emails?
4. Is using AI extraction (OpenAI/Claude) the best approach, or is there a more stable method?
5. Should we continue using Excel Online tables or move to something else long term?
6. Has anyone built something similar for work orders/service businesses?

Would appreciate any architecture suggestions, best practices, or lessons learned.

Hi all,

I’m new to Microsoft Flow, and I really like it. However, I have to deliver a major client demo using this new tool, which I only discovered a couple of days ago, and I've built a few flows using Co-Pilot Chat to assist me.

I am trying to automate: every month, an email is sent out. This email contains a link to a Power App that updates a list. Another flow picks up this list, updating the submit field and an online Excel sheet using scripts. The first flow has three loops; if the person doesn’t fill out the form, it sends a reminder email and later an escalation email.

While I’ve reached this stage, I want to test everything, but it’s quite disorganised.

I’ve seen something called generative action, which I am eager to test out tomorrow. However, if any veterans have tips or tricks on how I could better use Flow, I’d love to hear them. Many thanks in advance.

Ps didnt really have time to typeout the details cos I need to go but feel to ask me questions :)

Hi, I’m fairly new to Power Automate.

After setting up the microsoft office download workflow, I started experimenting with automations for Outlook and Excel and now I’m trying to expand my setup a bit. I use wps office or libreoffice sometimes for quick edits because it runs lighter on my laptop, but for automation I’m mostly sticking with Microsoft tools.

For people here with solid workflows:

What apps/services integrate really well with Power Automate that beginners should check out?

Thanks in advance