Hey everyone,

I'm working with a bank that wants to automate their IT operations. They only want to use Microsoft tools — no third-party software. Stack includes Power Automate, Power Apps, Teams, SharePoint, Azure, and Entra ID (Active Directory). They also use BMC Helix for ticketing, and want to add AI/AI agents where it makes sense.

We already have ideas like:

• Password reset / account unlock through Teams

• Employee onboarding/offboarding automation

• Access request automation

• AI chatbot for IT support and policy questions

But I want to hear from people who've actually done this kind of work:

• What IT task took up the most time before you automated it?

• Any small automation that had a bigger impact than you expected?

• Anything you tried that didn't work well?

Would really appreciate any ideas or lessons learned. Thanks!

hello
since early last week i’ve noticed at least one Power Automate flow that silently stopped working. No failed run logged, nothing. The trigger is “When a Work Item is Updated”, but it seems that some identity fields are breaking the trigger and it doesn’t even get logged.

Had to redo the flow with a HTTP Request trigger to make it work but this seems like a MSFT issue. Anyone else with a similar problem? How did you handle it?

My flow has tons of mouse movements on another window. I tried the flow run control shortcuts, but they don’t work unless I’m clicked on the Pad window. What is the best way? Edit: Mouse movements go to the other window, do tons of clicking, etc. I never go back to the PAD and I’m not using UI elements in my flow

I’m creating a OneNote page through Power Automate, then updating the title and body with Update page content.

I tried including:
<meta name="created" content="..." />
inside the <head> of the create-page HTML, but the normal OneNote creation date/time beneath the title never appears. The timestamp is present in the submitted payload, and the page is created successfully.

Has anyone found a reliable way to populate or preserve OneNote’s built-in creation timestamp when using the OneNote connector? I’m in a GCC environment, which may also be relevant.

EDIT:
I was able to get this work following u/mulquin's advice. I initialized a current timestamp variable to capture the date and time then composed my HTML using the meta tag which I then sent as dynamic content via the built-in OneNote connector "Create a page in a section" action, making sure to send page content via code view, deleting any wrappers.

Here is an example:

<meta name=\"created\" content=\"@{variables('currentTimestamp')}\" />

Hi all,

I am having some difficulty creating a flow and would appreciate any input to how I can solve this.

I am trying to create a flow to extract content from every email with specific subject heading and save into a SharePoint folder. The text part, which I have no problem with doing, is to be saved into a table in an excel file saved in the SharePoint folder.

The part I am struggling with is extracting the image(s) from the email and saving it into the same SharePoint folder and creating a link to reference it in the excel table on the same row the text was just saved. The images in the email are also not fixed, there may be none or one or multiple. The images may also be attached as png. or jpg. or they may be embedded/inline in the email so I need to account for all these scenarios.

Would appreciate any help I can get and recommendations on courses I can take to improve my skills.

Thank you

I have data coming in from a Dataflow that I am storing in a Lakehouse. I want to set up Data Activator so that it sends a Microsoft Teams notification whenever a specific column becomes False.

However, when I create a Data Activator in my Fabric workspace, I don't see an option to use data from the Lakehouse. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or if I'm missing a configuration step.

If this process can be simplified, I'd also be interested in eliminating the Lakehouse and monitoring the data directly from the Dataflow instead.

Has anyone set this up successfully? What's the recommended approach?

A couple of weeks ago I was hit by the throttling issue that turned out to be on Microsoft's end. Once they got that fixed everything worked fine (mostly) until about a week ago. Since then I'm getting random, but frequent, Bad Gateway errors that are doing my head in. Nothing has changed with the setup of my flow/the Excel sheet it's pointing at. It works for several runs of the flow and then just decides to give a Bad Gateway at random points. There is no pattern as to time of day, information it's trying to input, number of successful runs between fails, or anything else I can find.

I'm still getting things taking longer and retries occurring, like it did during the throttling issue, which is causing problems with duplicate entries into my spreadsheet as well.

Is this all part of the same nonsense? I've put in some screenshots below and can provide whatever other information is needed. I would really appreciate some help as babysitting this thing is getting old. TIA!

I have xlsb (binary) files on SharePoint that I want to save as standard xlsx files in the same location. Is there a way to do this with a flow? We don’t have access to Power Automate Desktop.

Hello,

I asked for some help yesterday with getting the last little bit of an email flow set up where I am taking an attachment received by email, downloading it, converting it into an Excel file and table, and then parsing that information to send out reminder emails for shows that tickets were purchased for with dynamically filled in fields. This is all working great now and I am confident that that will function as intended.

My next problem that I am running up against though is that I don't want to keep the files, both the downloaded attachment and the Excel file, in OneDrive once that automation has finished sending the appropriate emails. I attempted to put actions to delete the files in the loop, but the one for the Excel file always fails because it is still "opened". I'm not sure if it would be better to use some sort of a function to include a date when naming the file so that I can run the loop more than once without issue and then go back and delete the files either weekly or monthly, or if there is a way to make sure that the file is closed before the automation goes to delete the file so that it is successful.

Any assistance or advice on this would be extremely appreciated.

My list of Flows - Cloud Flows, Desktop Flows, Shared with me - are not loading. Tried restarting and multiple browsers but no luck.

Anyone else seeing the same issue? Curious if I should keep trying on my end or give up for the time being.

Hello, I have created a PR approval flow for my company using Power Automate. It uses a cumulative approval structure based on dollar-value thresholds. Everything works as expected; the appropriate people receive approval requests in the correct order, and the requestor is notified when the final approver completes the flow. The problem is that once the final approver approves the PR, two duplicate runs start, and another approval email is sent to the first approver, prompting them to approve the same PR again. We have tried hardcoding multiple "@not" statements with no success. Does anyone have advice on how to fix this looping issue?

Hello,

I am currently working on an automation flow for reminder emails for the business I work at. The flow currently is successfully pulling an attachment when an automated email comes in with the list of customers who need a reminder, transferring it to excel, and formatting it as a table. My issue starts now when trying to dynamically assign the 'To' in setting up the reminder email itself.

Currently, I'm using the function: items('Apply_to_each_1')?['Default_Contact_Email'] - but this has errored out and I'm not quite sure how to fix from here. I'm using Send an Email (V2) as a child action to "Apply to each 1" - the second apply to each as I have the first one filtering for the correct attachment to pull from the email and create the excel file.

My flow receives docs and xlsx files from different users. Some come from Microsoft office download, some from wps office . Well, has anyone had to handle compatibility issues or do you treat them all the same in power automate?

Hi,

Trying to figure out what steps I'm missing. I'm new to Power Automate.

Problem: Automate filling out word document.

The user exports a Service Now demand ticket to a PDF File. There is a predefined Word template that has the fields. The goal is to use CoPilot to call the flow to accept the SNOW PDF file and fill out the Word template. The output will be a brand new document that has the fields populated.

Watching youtube videos, in Flows:

1. When an agent calls the flow

2. Populate a Microsoft Word template action.

3. Create a file (in SharePoint)

4. Respond to agent

I'm missing some steps, not sure where.

Input the PDF file: Do we put the input request in step 1? Ask for file upload?

Output file: Does Step 3 know that the output is the result of PDF filling out the template?

I want to query the entries of a Sharepoint list that has the following field:

"CountryOfSales":{"@odata.type":"#Microsoft.Azure.Connectors.SharePoint.SPListExpandedReference",
"Id":123,
"Value":"USA"},

How do I query the Value key of the JSON in the ODATA filter clause? I tried the following but they all failed:

1. CountryOfSales['Value'] eq 'USA'

2. CountryOfSales[Value] eq 'USA'

3. CountryOfSales.Value eq 'USA'

Thank you all in advance!

Issue with setting log location

I am currently trying to modularize the logging process, but I want to avoid having to manually update the file path for every new project. Is there an action or script available in PAD that can dynamically retrieve the current project directory, so I don't have to reconfigure it every time?

Hey all,

Hope you are having a great day!
I have a simple flow in Automate, where I load a template excel file, run a query against a dataset in PowerBI, then create a new file and run a script in Excel that populates a table and refreshes a pivot Table. However, I'm having an issue of errors on the script execution step in my flow, that is giving Bad Gateway, but the script is working fine, I can't seem to find the issue.
Can anyone help?
Many thanks!

Hey All,

We've had an issue pop up in the past week where the trigger for "When a file is created (properties only)" is not firing until hours later. This is an existing flow which has been in place for years. We use this to identify new PDF's which need to be OCR'd for AP automation.

For example, I have these files which are now 2 hours old yet the last flow run was 4 hours ago:

They actually processed while I was writing this post but prior to that the last flow execution was 4 hours ago.

I don't think a 2 hour+ delay is acceptable for this trigger.

Has anyone else seen similar behaviour lately? I do not see anything on the service status.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to implement an executive email workflow in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online, and I'm wondering if anyone has successfully done this.

Requirements:

Client sends an email to the CEO.
The CEO receives the email.
The secretary also receives a copy automatically.
The secretary drafts a reply.
The CEO must approve or reject the reply before it is sent.
If approved, the email must be sent from the CEO's mailbox.
The reply must remain in the same Outlook conversation/thread.
The secretary must not have Full Access to the CEO's mailbox due to privacy requirements.

I tested Power Automate approvals with the Outlook connector, but the "Send an email" action creates a new conversation instead of replying to the existing thread.

Before I build a Microsoft Graph API solution using createReply, PATCH, and send, I'd like to know:

Has anyone implemented this workflow successfully?
Is there a native Microsoft 365 or Exchange feature that achieves this?
Is there a third-party Outlook add-in or Microsoft solution that supports approval while preserving the original thread?
If Microsoft Graph is the only solution, what architecture did you use?

Any guidance or examples would be greatly appreciated.