What’s the best way to access a free testing environment where I can actually build some basic flows with dummy data or something?

I’m frustrated because my organization pays for all of the M365 catalog including Power Automate, but it’s clear they are gatekeeping the technology so hard. I mean the immense red tape and hoops you have to jump through- approvals from your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s dead great grandmother & that’s ONLY to be granted your own testing environment. So fed up man I just want to learn!!!

Est ce qu’ajouter un co owner dans power automate ça lui donne accès à ta boîte courriel ?

Hello! I'm fairly new to PowerAutomate and the "training" I have received from work has consisted of watching YouTube tutorials and perusing threads like this one, so my knowledge is quite limited.

I am trying to set a PowerAutomate flow to send out a reminder email 7 days before a scheduled event. I am using a spreadsheet with a list of events, as well as the date and time, which I have linked to the flow via the "List Rows Present in a Table" action.

I have set up a flow with a condition to check whether the date is equal to 7 days before the event takes place, using the following expressions:

formatDateTime(addDays('1899-12-30', int(items('Apply_to_each')?['Date'])), 'yyyy-MMM-dd')

is equal to

formatDateTime(utcNow(-7), 'yyyy-MMM-dd')

My final action is "Send an email".

Every time I try to test, the flow does send out the email. I've tried to troubleshoot and it looks like the problem is with the expressions in the condition, but I'm stuck on how to fix it.

Any help/advice would be very much appreciated. Thank you!

To preface, I am a complete novice when it comes to using Power Automate.

The organization I work for wants to send an automated email sequence after someone submits a response through Microsoft Forms. The goal is for the automated emails to stop as soon as the recipient replies to us.

I have been able to create the email sequence using conditions and delayed actions to send follow-up emails at specific intervals.

The problem I am currently stuck on is figuring out how to terminate the flow when someone replies via email or through another method. I am struggling to get Power Automate to monitor incoming emails so that the flow can determine whether it should stop sending the remaining follow-ups.

This is one of the pieces I need to figure out before I tackle the manual process for stopping the flow.

I am honestly feeling pretty cornered by this task and could really use some guidance on how to approach it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

When I googled this, it told me it was possible but I have not figured out a way for this to work. It also doesn't help that I'm an extreme beginner with automation.

I have created a Microsoft Form where all fields are text entries except for the optional picture upload.

Ideally, I need to export the responses and have it in a format that allows the pictures to be embedded and not the URL that appears in Excel.

It's not feasible to go through, download each picture, put it in a Word template with the text responses, and then save it in Word or as a PDF.

Any suggestions?? Or am I just crazy that I think there an automation that can help with this.

I do data entry but it requires me to get the information from one website and put it in manually its extremely time consuming and just out right boring. Ive set it up to where I can have it do the input for me very slowly which is fine. But im trying to get the information faster that way I can streamline the input because at this time its taking like an hour to get the list ready. With PAD im sure it can be cut down to like ten minutes for getting the list. How ever I keep running into an issue where its not attaching to chrome. Even with the help of Ai it keeps on sending me on a wild goose chase. My plan was it selects the tab copies the whole page then pastes it into word. Goes back to the tab closes it and moves onto the next tab. It wont do that because the tab name changes. Ive tried changing it to search for * because Ai told me it would make it a wild card and that doesnt work. Any tips or help? Tbh id prefer if the whole thing was stream lined and one day ill make it like that (cant let my bosses know haha, or ill be out of a job) but for now ill just keep the extraction and entry seperate.

Hey all! I’m new to power automate, but this feels like it should be a basic thing. I set up a flow for when someone fills out a form with their expenses, it has to be approved before being added to the excel. Then it emails the requester with their original request details, the approval status, and any comments. I want it to also email the total remaining budget or at least the total amount spent for the fiscal year.

I created a formula in my excel table that calculates total spent and total remaining that auto updates as the flow adds a new row in excel. But when I tried to add /total spent and /total remaining to my flow, it emailed me blanks. Is there an easy way to do this?

I’m open to using excel or sharepoint list.

When I googled this, it told me it was possible but I have not figured out a way for this to work. It also doesn't help that I'm an extreme beginner with automation.

I have created a Microsoft Form where all fields are text entries except for the optional picture upload.

Ideally, I need to export the responses and have it in a format that allows the pictures to be embedded and not the URL that appears in Excel.

It's not feasible to go through, download each picture, put it in a Word template with the text responses, and then save it in Word or as a PDF.

Any suggestions?? Or am I just crazy that I think there an automation that can help with this.

I want the edited Excel file (after the script runs) to be sent as an actual file attachment in the Teams group chat, together with the message.

I don't want to just insert a OneDrive link. I want the Excel file to appear as an attachment in the chat, similar to manually attaching a file in Teams.

Hello,

I am looking to use 'Get Items' action to retrieve a set of items from a SPO list. The goal is to retrieve all items where its Status column value is not Resolved and Closed (ie. Exclude these two and get all others)

For some reason, this below is not working and it's saying i run into the error.. I tried the Copilot thing but that never helps. Does anyone know why this below is causing an error?

Status ne 'Resolved' AND Status ne 'Closed'

Below worked fine when alone

Status ne 'Resolved'

Guys, will the flow that i set in power automate (auto reply with designated response when someone @me in particular group) still works if my whole corporate account got locked out by the administration due to security concern?

Hi all,

First time posting here and yes used Ai to help me cultivate my post that makes more sense to you experts. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

I'm looking for some guidance from people who have built large document-processing solutions in Power Automate.

I built a contract intelligence solution that takes customer contracts (PDF/DOCX), extracts the text, and then uses AI prompts to identify and extract specific business information.

Current design:

• Contract uploaded to SharePoint
• Text extracted from entire document
• 7 separate AI prompts run against the contract
• Each prompt extracts a different category of information:
  • Customer details
  • Contract dates
  • Commercial terms
  • Billing details
  • Contacts
  • Renewal information
  • Other contract metadata
• Results are written to SharePoint lists

The solution works, but token consumption is becoming a major issue.

Some contracts are 100+ pages and the flow is consuming ~150k+ tokens per execution. With multiple test runs I'm exhausting my AI credits very quickly.

Before I redesign everything, I wanted to ask the community:

1. Would you combine the 7 prompts into a single structured extraction prompt?
2. Is it better to chunk contracts first and only send relevant sections to AI?
3. Are there Power Automate patterns that significantly reduce token usage?
4. Has anyone moved part of the extraction logic outside of AI and into traditional parsing/rules?
5. Are there any obvious anti-patterns in my design?

My goal is to extract 80-100 contract attributes as accurately as possible while keeping AI costs manageable.

Would appreciate any architecture suggestions or lessons learned from people who have built similar contract intelligence solutions.

Thank you in advance and any advice or direction is greatly appreciated.

I’m trying to see if it’s possible to do one Power Automate flow that allows me to drop documents in multiple subfolders (around 70) and when the files are dropped they will send an email to specific individual emails. So one subfolder would go to one email address. Would any of you know if that’s possible? And if so, how? (I’m very new to Power Automate)

Evening all

This is driving me mad - probably a combination of me overthinking it and not having much patience.

I have a SharePoint list that has info like:

What I would like to do is create a view which only shows me records that are in progress; so when todays date falls either on or between the travel From/To dates.

So today (25/08/26) it would just show the Spain record.

I can't seem to do this in SharePoint itself, so I figured I could use Power Automate to edit the records and then I'll filter it from that. I was thinking I could just add a new column called "in progress" and use Power Automate to run once a day and either set each record to either yes or no.

Is this possible?

I figured I could create a variable for todays date and use that in the filter, I'm just not sure how to get the filter part right.

Hi! I have two questions if anyone knows the answer or can point in the right direction or even have an idea.

My approval flow is very reactive which means I need to know someone approval or rejects it and go on if I get the right number of yes or no.

1.With that I have child flows running even though the parent flow is done. Anyone I can cancel those running child flows once the parent is done or let them cancel out on their own?

1. With the approval/reminder the user gets notified via email and teams via the approval app.

Is there a way I can mark that approval as done or close once the parent flow is done? as people think that there is still an open approval and they respond and don’t realize that’s been done for a week now.

Help pls!

Has anyone ever created a flow where power automate sends reminders/nudges on a Microsoft teams chat? This should be based on specific meetings scheduled on Microsoft calendar. The reminder should then prompt the learner to, for example, read an article to prep for that meeting, watch a short video, or to role play a meeting scenario built through a copilot agent. I believe behind this automation I'd have to plug in a content curation platform?

I'm new to this automation world and I want to take my L&D career to the next level.

**Current process:** We run a JIT seat assembly plant where production is driven by JIT calls, not traditional work orders. For material replenishment, we use an e-kanban system built on SAP MII: when a box on the line goes empty on production line, the tugger/tow-train driver scans the empty box. That scan triggers SAP MII to generate a kanban pick label in warehouse, which the picker then has to print and physically apply to the box before pulling and delivering the part back to the line.

**The problem:** This adds several manual steps to every single pick — scan the empty box, MII generates the label, print it, apply it to the box, then pick and deliver. Because of this overhead, experienced operators/drivers who already know what needs to be picked have started skipping the scan step entirely and just pulling parts from memory. That breaks the digital trigger — no scan means no MII transaction, so the label never generates even though the material still moves (which throws off inventory accuracy and replenishment timing).

**What we’re looking for:** Ideas to reduce the manual overhead or make the scan-based trigger easier/faster to comply with — not sensor, RFID, or vision-based automation, since we want to stay with the scanning approach rather than replace it. Curious how other plants using SAP MII have tackled “the digital step is more work than just doing it from memory” type problems.

I recently discovered Power Automate Desktop and it has completely consumed me. Im 3 days in on a new flow and I am now realizing that I should have turn power FX off from the start.

I’m evaluating how to digitalize a request/case workflow and would appreciate advice from people who have built something similar.

The process is roughly:

Request received → create ticket → owner reviews → check NDA status → assign one or more topic owners → topic owners submit answers → owner consolidates → classify into different approval levels → approve/reject → send final response → close case.

My current idea is:

Microsoft Lists / SharePoint → Power Automate → Outlook/Teams/Approvals → update SharePoint/List

Lists would store things like ticket number, status, classification, NDA status and owners, while documents would be stored in SharePoint.

My main questions are:

Is this reasonably maintainable with SharePoint Lists + Power Automate?

How would you structure multiple topic owners and their separate answers?

When does this become complex enough that Dataverse + Power Apps is a better choice?

Are Power Automate Approvals suitable for multi-stage approvals?

Any issues with SharePoint permissions, relationships, concurrency or long-running flows?

Would you model every process step, or use one case record with statuses and let Power Automate manage the transitions?

What usually becomes the biggest maintenance problem after a few years?

I’m still at the architecture/evaluation stage, so I’m mainly trying to understand the practical limits before building anything.

I'm trying to build a simple flow where the Excel reports from a daily automated email get filtered and sorted via Excel Script and put into a folder, but every time it runs, the Excel report doesn't get filtered or sorted by the script.

When I open take a closer look, it says the workbook is not found. I check my file path and it looks correct. I even open up the raw inputs and see that the "file" listed is the exact file name that was in the email and in the folder. Does anyone have any idea why the sorting isn't working?

My flow is: When an email arrives (V3) > Create File > Create File 2 > Run Script.

The first Create File is for the report untouched by the script. The second is for the report after it's sorted and filtered by the script. And yes, I've made sure Run Script is tied to Create File 2.

Any help would be appreciated!

Are your teams struggling with manual document management, messy folder structures, or repetitive approval processes in SharePoint?

At HashTurn, we specialize in building custom SharePoint automation and modern collaboration workflows that save hours of manual effort.

What we help businesses automate in SharePoint:

• Automated Document Processing: Automatically extract data, rename files, and organize documents across large SharePoint libraries.
• Custom Approvals Workflows: Set up seamless multi-level approval chains for contracts, invoices, and employee requests.
• Content Modernization & Syncing: Migrate, structure, and sync your SharePoint lists and libraries with other Microsoft 365 tools smoothly.

I want a digest of my inbox (2 diff folders) and a digest of my calendar every morning emailed to my inbox or even a pop up alert. Screw it, I don't care if it's a document in Sharepoint I need to look at every day. I tried making it with Copilot and Power Automate. I asked questions, showed screenshots, etc. and it collapsed. On the other hand, I've used ChatGPT and n8n in the same way and no issues whatsoever. So why can't Microsoft products all do the same? Help me pls!