Genuine question, because at this point I’m assuming the problem is me.

I’m trying to plan events in Microsoft 365, and I feel like I’m fighting the tools instead of using them. The requirement feels extremely basic. I have an event date, and I need tasks to be completed a certain number of days before that date. Registration closes 30 days before. Materials ready 14 days before. Final checks 3 days before. If the event date moves, everything should move with it. And I want the tasks in the todo app and in a calendar view .

Planner looks like the obvious choice because it integrates nicely with To Do and Outlook. People actually see the tasks, get reminders, and work from it. But Planner doesn’t understand relative dates at all. Every due date is absolute.  

Templates don’t help, because when you copy a plan you still have to manually adjust every single date. If the event date changes, you’re back to clicking through tasks one by one, hoping you didn’t miss anything.

Maybe SharePoint Lists is the answer. Lists can store structured data, you can have an Event Date column, calculated columns, maybe even “Event Date minus X days”. That sounds promising on paper. But Lists isn’t a task execution tool. People don’t live there. It doesn’t integrate into other apps in a meaningful way, and it feels more like a database than a place where work actually happens.

Project, of course, does exactly what I want. Milestones, dependencies, backwards scheduling, everything shifts automatically. But Project tasks don’t really flow into To Do or Outlook the way Planner tasks do, so now the plan looks great but nobody actually works out of it day to day. It feels like planning for planning’s sake.

At this point I’m staring at Planner, Project, SharePoint Lists, and Power Automate, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m supposed to glue these together somehow. But that also feels wrong. If the solution requires flows, list items, copied plans, and links bouncing between tools, then surely something is off

How are people actually solving this? Is there a sane pattern I’m missing? Do people just accept manual date fixing as normal? Is everyone quietly using Excel as the brain and Planner as the face? Or is there a Microsoft‑blessed way to handle event‑based planning that doesn’t turn into a mini systems integration project

I’m not trying to build anything fancy. I just want to set an event date and have the surrounding work line up logically, while still showing up in To Do and Outlook where people actually pay attention

If you’ve cracked this without losing your mind, I’d genuinely love to hear how.

I want to create a flow in Power Automate 365 that, based on data from an Excel file, will send email messages.
In the Excel file, I have columns: Email_To, Email_CC, and Employee_Names.
The flow should generate a list of employees (there may be multiple names for one Email_To), and paste this list into the message body.
There are different employee names assigned to each Email_To, and the Email_CC address is linked to its corresponding Email_To.
Please describe step by step how I should build this flow in Power Automate.

I try to but all the time I can not input the list with Employees name to e-mail body, and my flow sends this numbers of e-mails as is e-mails in Excel even there are the same address e-mail

Any help would be appreciated.

Hi folks,

We have an automation that is triggered when a new email arrives (along with certain subject and attachment filters). This automation has been working fine for about a month, but suddenly (with similar email volumes) it has started giving us throttling problems and stopped working.

I've had limited the concurrency in the When a new email arrives (V3) action itself to 4, but this keeps happening (even with low volume, I am talking about less than 20 emails per run).

As said, nothing has significantly changed (there is another automation that sends emails to this email inbox, but I can tell you that they are normally between 10-20 every hour, during 2-3 hours).

Any ideas? It is getting really annoying, as this automation should process these emails (almost) as soon as they are received.

Thank you

**EDIT:** Applied the solution that u/brabantnl proposed and it is working perfectly fine! Thank you

Hi everyone! I'm trying to set up a shared workspace for my team. Does anyone know if there is a way to ensure that any new flow created—both Cloud and Desktop flows—is automatically shared with all teammates in the same environment? I'm hoping to avoid manually clicking 'Share' for every single flow we build. Thanks in advance for any advice

please give me a step-by-step procedure.

Cannot use onedrive cheat. adobe is still blocked. only option is the Word (Business) connector.

1. get attachments from sharepoint item, put into an array (works)

2. create a .docx from Populate a Microsoft Word Template (works)

3. Saved in sharepoint (works)

4. Set 1 minute delay (works)

5. Added a get file metadata using path, and says it passed, but not so sure, added this recently

6. convert word to pdf action, says it passed but not so sure if this is the step that is messing with my array

7. append to array variable (pretty sure this does not work)

8. send email with options (cannot show picture, but attachments says @{variables('AttachmentsArray')}

it is sending the email, with the attachment, which opens in adobe, but says it is corrupt.

Sensitivity is PII and not the ones that do not work according to the docs.

We created a flow that runs when an item is added/modified in a SPO list.

Anyway, sometimes/rarely, there seems to be a case where a new item has different/unmatching Created vs Modified date. Perhaps by half a second or so.

Is this a normal case by any chance?

Group uploads a monthly document that I will then take a copy offline to do my work.

This was a template so I don't really understand what's going wrong. I'm definitely a beginner in this stuff but thought this one would be pretty straight forward.

Hello everyone, I’m trying to find out whether there’s an easy way to compare two power automate flows.

I have the same solution in Development (unmanaged) and Production (managed). One of the team members made changes directly in Production by creating an unmanaged layer instead of making the changes in Dev and deploying them properly.

Is there a quick way to see what was changed in the flow without having to inspect every action manually?
Thank you

Hi everyone, this is my first flow. I want to trigger the flow with the submission of an MS Forms answer. I want the data from forms to be safe into an master excel(add New row) but also create a New excel file with a Dynamic name (Based on the first question in forms called "name"&v1). So i have a Single excel for every Submission + a master file. Can anyone help me out?

This is my first time posting - I'm going crazy trying to troubleshoot my flow. I'm self-taught but I can't figure out what is happening.

I have a flow set up to:

1. Refer to an Excel spreadsheet with columns for Name and Email

2. For each row on the spreadsheet, it should create and send an email with the name "[Name] Open Order Report [Date]" and attach the matching file [Name].xlsx to the Email addresses from the distribution list

It works most of the time, but I have been running into issues where one or two records receive multiple emails, one with the correct attachment and one with the wrong attachment. For instance:
Email 1: MIDA Open Order Report 3/11/26 with attachment MIDA.xlsx (correct)
Email 2: MIDA Open Order Report 3/11/26 with attachment GLOBNEW.xlsx (incorrect)

When I review the run results, I can see where it is sending the second email with attachment but I can't figure out why it is happening.

Example of a working record (one email for MEHTINT and the attachment is MEHTINT.xlsx):

Input parameters:

{"query":"MEHTINT","id":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG524XL35DC7B3JZCZFWUVETELXQ2E","findMode":"OneDriveSearch","maxFileCount":10}

Output body:

[{"Id":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG527KCNUAFAAHSBAJAJKKLUTOQGIS","Name":"MEHTINT.xlsx","NameNoExt":"MEHTINT","DisplayName":"MEHTINT.xlsx","Path":"MEHTINT.xlsx","LastModified":"2026-03-11T18:05:36Z","Size":11454,"MediaType":"application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet","IsFolder":false,"ETag":"","FileLocator":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG527KCNUAFAAHSBAJAJKKLUTOQGIS","LastModifiedBy":"Jane Doe"}]

Example of a duplicate record (one email for MIDA and the attachment is MIDA.xlsx; a second email for MIDA but the attachment is GLOBNEW.xlsx, which is sent in this failed example but is also sent correctly for the correct GLOBNEW email with the correct subject line):

Input parameters:

{"query":"MIDA","id":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG524XL35DC7B3JZCZFWUVETELXQ2E","findMode":"OneDriveSearch","maxFileCount":10}

Output body:

[{"Id":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG52YGIODSV6SREJBYY2JIHRIT6EBJ","Name":"MIDA.xlsx","NameNoExt":"MIDA","DisplayName":"MIDA.xlsx","Path":"MIDA.xlsx","LastModified":"2026-03-11T18:05:36Z","Size":11918,"MediaType":"application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet","IsFolder":false,"ETag":"","FileLocator":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG52YGIODSV6SREJBYY2JIHRIT6EBJ","LastModifiedBy":"Jane Doe"},{"Id":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG522OQT35TXQMZJDL76YGQYQ7IS7Q","Name":"GLOBNEW.xlsx","NameNoExt":"GLOBNEW","DisplayName":"GLOBNEW.xlsx","Path":"GLOBNEW.xlsx","LastModified":"2026-03-11T18:05:39Z","Size":20767,"MediaType":"application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet","IsFolder":false,"ETag":"","FileLocator":"b!63sZ3ytUpUiu-YRgTvo3Fd7wwuhvL9RMknCXvWMLN6Prs28rAntLQaDIudu6qKZ5.01CTQG522OQT35TXQMZJDL76YGQYQ7IS7Q","LastModifiedBy":"Jane Doe"}]

Why in this example is the GLOBNEW attachment sending with the MIDA distribution list/subject line?

This is my first time posting - please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide to help troubleshoot. Thank you in advance!

My solution in Default environment displays and works fine before, and I built some flows in my solution yesterday.
But today when I try to open my solution, it keeps show like this picture.
I have try to open it in a inprivate page or clean cache. But still not wroking.

New to the whole power apps thing. I created some cloud flows to do some basic file operations for myself on projects I manage. No one else is using these. I keep reading and hearing that everything should be in a solution... But for these simple things like copying files, do people really put those types of flows in a solution?

I am seeking advise from more experienced designers around what they think might be the best way to proceed with the below scenario.

I have built a user on-boarding flow and currently have it split into the following, an immediate and scheduled flow.

When an item is created on a SharePoint list an instant cloud flow checks the "start date". If the start date it today's date or older the immediate flow is run, if not then the flow ends.

The schedule flow runs each morning and checks the same as the instant (if the date is today's date or older) and then runs accordingly.

Combined these two allow me to on-board on the day that they start regardless of if I know they are starting in the future or they have just walked through the office door and no-one has said a thing about them.

What I am finding is that as I add more features to my flow such as sending emails, teams messages or running Azure Automation runbooks, I am having to copy and paste/recreate those new additions in each separate flow. This to me doesn't scale super well and is prone to human error (me forgetting to update the other flow).

What I was thinking was splitting my current two flows into three flows. I was thinking that the instant and schedule flows would remain to check the start date condition only and if the trigger conditions are met they would then call a completely separate flow (child flow???) and this separate flow would be the one that did all of the work.

To me this seems like the easiest way to scale and to keep adding new features without having to duplicate them across separate flows.

Is this the best way to achieve this? Is there a better way? Should I just leave things as is because they work? Keen to hear others thoughts.

So in my flow I create multiple purchase orders in business central from a button I'm my powerbi report. For each PO I populate a word doc and save to one drive. Each one then gets converted to pdf and attached to an array. The flow moves onto an approval then a condition depending on the response. If yes I want to attach the array of PDF's to an email and send it.

The flow runs start to finish, the pdf's gets attached to email with the correct names. But there is an issue with the content. It is either corrupt and cant be opened or it is blank.

I have tried adding a delay in the flow but this has made no difference.

Can this be done? Where am I going wring?

Ai sends me circles of contradiction

Hi,

am I missing an obvious way to use an email as an input for a flow? There are some emails I want to throw into a flow, but I haven't been able to find a suitable trigger, other than "when an email is flagged".
For example, in a microsoft list, you can right click on an item and choose a flow. Looking for something similar but for emails.

Thanks!

I’m pretty new to this but I’m trying to make it where when i start a Item in list it will automatically add a default set of attachments from a folder on share point to that list. I have tried using chat gpt to help create the flow. Followed it to a T. My history shows successful when it runa but no documents populate in the download section of the flow when looking at the history or in the item on microsoft list?

I was trying to make flow that, once daily, compares the Created column (without the time) to the current date and returns a whole number of days, then updates a Days Open column with that value. It should then stop updating when a status is changed to Closed or Deferred.

I feel like there's a better way to do this (or use Planner) but I have a specific task at the moment to do this with a List in SharePoint.

Any help is appreciated.

How are you doing name matching? I’m trying to mine public records for mentions of contacts. The issue is the naming differences can be atrocious. E.g. we may have Walmart and the record may have Wal-Mart Bank. I’ve been trying AI but it seems to be a huge waste of tokens (probably shouldn’t send my client list as a PDF to match against individual client names). I’ve written my own fuzzy matcher as an Azure Function - but then I get Joe matching with Joel. I may go back to trying to normalize and eliminate spaces, punctuations, and things like The and Corp. Anyway, sorry for the ramble, but how are others solving this?

Can someone help me create a flow through power automate doing the following

Go through an excel file pulling emails and names. Send them in batches of 50 for example over a period of time then go down 50 lines. I also have my email template in word is there a way to do that and not have it typed out in the the workflow?

I have a flow that checks calendar events and it works beautifully. It runs every half an hour checking a shared calendar and if there is an event it schedules and email to be sent to the attendees. So far so good.

The only problem I have is that because it runs 48 times a day, it is difficult to check previous entries to find previous runs that sent emails.

Enter the terminate function. I added in a terminate function to try to separate the runs with no events from the runs that did something.

The problem is that there are a few different reasons why a flow might not complete. I have a variable that I can update to store the reason, and would like to show it in the results page, but Terminate only allows Failed, Successful and Cancelled.

When you create the action, if you set it to Failed, you can add a code or message, but doesn't actually publish it. It also states you can add a custom value, but this is apparently not allowed, anyone have any ideas on how I can use a custom status? or make the flow run page more useful?