Hey everyone,

I run a small YouTube channel called Automate M365 where I focus on making straight-to-the-point, step-by-step Power Automate tutorials. No fluff or long intros, just diving into the actual logic because I know how annoying it is to sit through a 10-minute video just to find a quick expression fix.

I want to build some tutorials around automation, but instead of just guessing what to make next, I want to solve real-world headaches.

Whether it's setting up automated deadline remidners based on dates in your SP lists or Excel sheets, sending dynamic emails to people pulled directly from a person column, or trying to manage folder permissions via HTTP actions—what’s driving you crazy right now? Drop it in the comments below. I’ll honestly try to look through them and build the exact solution in a step-by-step video for you.

If you want to check out the channel or subscribe to see if I build your fix, the link is here:

https://www.youtube.com/@AutomateM365

Let me know what you're stuck on, hopefully we can figure it out.

Question says it all really. In particular is it useful for automating, or are there better tools for the job? My workplace happens to have the software but seems rarely used.

Hey guys, I’m looking for someone experienced with Power Automate, Splunk, and PowerShell to help with ongoing automation, scripting, integrations, and troubleshooting projects. This is not just a one time job. I’m looking for someone reliable to build a long term working partnership with. If you have experience in these areas and are interested, please send me a message with a little info about your background and availability.

Hi does anyone have any insights or experienced this issue previously? If so can you please share on how u have resolved this?

Hi everyone,

We are facing an issue with a Power Automate flow in a test environment and would appreciate any guidance.

Environment

We have a Power Automate flow created by User 1.

The flow contains multiple actions that require connections, such as:

• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Dataverse
• Other connector-based actions

The flow works correctly when it is tested from User 1's account.

User roles

We currently have two users in the same environment:

User 1 – Flow owner

• Basic User
• Environment Maker
• System Administrator
• System Customizer

User 2 – Tester

• Basic User
• Environment Maker

Issue

We use the "Send a copy" option in Power Automate to share the flow with User 2.

User 2 receives the flow and can set it up, but after opening the flow, all actions that require a connection show a connection error / connection needs to be configured.

This happens across multiple connector actions rather than with only one specific connector.

For example, actions that work correctly for User 1 show a connection error for User 2.

Important observation

We tested the same flow with User 2 after assigning the System Customizer role.

After giving User 2 System Customizer privileges, the connection issues are resolved and the flow works correctly.

When User 2 has only:

• Basic User
• Environment Maker

the connection errors occur.

Connection References

We are also investigating whether this is related to Connection References.

Our understanding is that the flow should use Connection References so that the flow can use the appropriate connection for the user/environment rather than being dependent on the original owner's connection.

However, we are not sure whether the "Send a copy" option correctly handles/rebinds the Connection References for the receiving user.

What we want to achieve

We do not want to give the Tester user the System Customizer role just to make the flow work.

We would like to keep the Tester user's permissions limited to:

• Basic User
• Environment Maker

and provide only the specific additional privileges required for the flow and its connection references.

Questions

1. Why do all connector actions show connection errors when the flow is shared using "Send a copy"?
2. Is this expected behavior when using "Send a copy" instead of deploying/importing the flow through a Solution?
3. Are there specific Dataverse privileges/security-role permissions required for a user to use Connection References?
4. What is the recommended security role configuration for a user who needs to create/test/run the flow without having System Customizer?

Any guidance on the required permissions or the recommended architecture would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Need help- I’ve tried everything but I can’t get my powerautomate flow to work. I have all the data I need in a table. It has the email address, name of the attachments, and subject line in the table. The flow needs to generate an email for each unique value in column a of the the row. It has to add a PDF and EXCEL file to each email. The pdf and excel files will be unique to each email based on the title, and the data is manually updated daily so it has to be a manual trigger.

I tried mail merge automation, I’ve tried several ways of doing this. Has anyone done this before and have any suggestions??

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 ?

UPDATE: Thank you everyone for your responses! I've managed to get the flow sending the reminder emails but for some reason it's sending emails for all my events, even ones that are in March next year (thankfully I'm in test mode so I'm only sending these emails to myself!) and I'm not sure where I'm going wrong.

*

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.

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.