A guide to Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Flow is a tool used for automating tasks in other accounts and services. If you’re running a business, or any aspect of it, it’s likely that you often find yourself struggling to fit in everything that you need to do. That’s where Microsoft Flow comes in. It eliminates a lot of the busywork, leaving you to concentrate on more important tasks and saving potentially hours of your time.

Microsoft Flow explained:

Microsoft Flow lets you automate and connect online apps or services that are already in use. It, like other automation software, creates chain reactions between customisation combinations of services. In practice, this means that a service is programmed to take action as soon as it receives a signal from something else. For any business burdened with many repetitive tasks, it’s a godsend – just one example may be receiving relevant information after you publish a post on social media. As you can imagine, this massively improves productivity.

Microsoft Flow is not the first to offer this service, but if you already use other Microsoft products like Outlook, this will suit you better than Zapier and IFTTT. Flow differs because it concentrates on Microsoft’s programs, such as PowerApps, Yammer, Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and others.

Examples of Microsoft Flow Templates

Flow has hundreds of templates to use – these are some of the most popular ones:

• Send yourself a reminder in ten minutes.
• Get today’s weather forecast from your current location.
• Send a customised email when a SharePoint item list is added.
• Get a push notification when you receive an email from your boss or important customer.
• Track your working hours.
• Save tweets to an excel file.
• Track Outlook emails in an excel file.

You can also use keywords to search for Flows which include a specific program or service. There are already plenty of Flows in existence which use programs that you probably already use, including Excel, SharePoint, PowerApps and Google Calendar.

In an age which sees many of us spending countless hours online for both business and leisure, automation services like Flow have become almost vital. Anything that cuts down down this time and allows for better time management is hugely beneficial and has many positive repercussions for your business. Hopefully this article has given you some helpful insight into this invaluable product.

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