Power Automate Templates: How to Simplify Your Workflow

As businesses embrace digital transformation, workflow automation has emerged as an essential strategy for streamlining operations and increasing efficiency. One key player in this field is Microsoft 365’s impressive offering: Power Automate Templates. These are pre configured, customizable workflows designed to automate various tasks, from handling emails and organizing data to complex business processes.

With its variants, including Power Automate Desktop Templates, Power Automate Email Templates, and Power Automate Flow Templates, Microsoft aims to simplify every user’s journey in process automation.

This article delves into the remarkable world of Power Automate Templates, highlighting the best offerings and their application in business. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, with a bit of power automate training, these tools will serve you as a launchpad toward an automated future.

Understanding Power Automate templates

Power Automate Templates are pre-built flows in Microsoft’s Power Automate suite, providing a range of automation capabilities to boost productivity, streamline business processes, manage social media, and facilitate data collection.

Power Automate for Business Templates: These templates cater to various business needs, from automating approval processes to streamlining repetitive tasks. For example, there’s a template to create an approval process when new items are added to a SharePoint list or a template to automatically track Outlook calendar events in an Excel spreadsheet. Such templates can significantly enhance business efficiency and accuracy.

Power Automate Template Examples: A diverse library of template examples exists, serving many unique tasks. These include “Save Office 365 email attachments to OneDrive for Business,” “Get a push notification when you receive an email from your boss,” and “Track Microsoft Forms response in an Excel Online (Business) spreadsheet.” By understanding these examples, users can grasp how templates work and learn to customize them to their needs.

Power Automate Productivity Templates: These templates are designed to aid personal and team productivity. For instance, templates automatically remind you of upcoming tasks, schedule meetings based on your availability, or flag important emails for follow-up. By leveraging these templates, teams can remain focused on their core tasks while the system handles administrative chores.

Power Automate Templates for Social Media: These templates automate common social media tasks, like posting updates across multiple platforms or tracking brand mentions. An example is the “Post a Tweet when a new blog post is published” template. Such automation can save considerable time and maintain a consistent brand presence across different channels.

Power Automate Templates for Data Collection: For organizations that handle large volumes of data, templates that aid in data collection can be a boon. They can automate processes like saving responses from a Microsoft Form to a SharePoint list or collating feedback from various sources into a single Excel file. Such templates simplify data management and ensure data accuracy and timeliness.

Understanding Power Automate Templates involves grasping their wide-ranging applicability and how they can be customized to meet specific user requirements. Users can explore, modify, and employ these templates to simplify their workflows, enhance productivity, and make data-driven decisions.

How to use Power Automate templates

Using Power Automate Templates can significantly simplify your workflow, whether you’re automating desktop tasks, managing emails, orchestrating data flows, or streamlining business processes. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Power Automate Templates:

Step 1: Access Power Automate

Log into the Power Automate portal using your Microsoft 365 credentials.

Step 2: Select a Template

Navigate to the “Templates” section. Here, you’ll find an extensive library of pre-built flows ranging from Power Automate Desktop Templates, Power Automate Email Templates to Power Automate Flow Templates, and more. Choose a template that fits your needs by clicking on it.

Step 3: Review the Template

You must select one template you want to use. And review the template’s details, which will provide an overview of its purpose, the services it uses, and its key triggers and actions.

Step 4: Sign in to Connect Services

Before using the template, you’ll need to sign in to the relevant services that the template uses. For example, if the template involves sending an email via Outlook and saving data to OndDrive, you must authenticate both of these services. Click on “Sign in” next to each service and follow the authentication process.

Step 4: Configure the Template

After connecting the necessary services, you’ll see a detailed view of the template with its predefined triggers and actions. Customize these as needed. For instance, specify the conditions under which an email is sent or define the specific One Drive Folder where data should be stored.

Step 6: Save and Test the Flow

Once you’ve made the necessary customizations, click on “Save” at the bottom of the screen. Then click on “Test” at the top right of the screen. Follow the prompts to test the flow and ensure it’s working as expected.

Step 7: Monitor the Flow

Once you’ve tested and verified the flow, it’s active and ready to use. You can monitor its performance through the dashboard in Power Automate. This allows you to track its activities, check for errors, and ensure it works effectively.

Examples of Power Automate templates

Microsoft Power Automate, previously known as Microsoft Flow, is a tool that allows users to create and automate workflows across multiple applications and services without the need for developer help. Templates are pre-built flows for popular tasks.

Here are some examples of Microsoft Power Automate templates:

1. Templates for business

Below I’ll share a perfect example of a Microsoft Power Automate template for automating the process of saving email attachments from Office 365 to OneDrive for Business. This is a commonly used template in many businesses to ensure all email attachments are stored securely and can be easily accessed.

Here are the step-by-step instructions.

Step 1

First, open a web browser and navigate to the Microsoft Power Automate website. Click ‘Sign In’ in the top right corner and log in with your Microsoft 365 credentials.

Step 2

Select the ‘Templates’ tab from the navigation menu on the home screen. In the search bar, type “Save Office 365 email attachments to OneDrive for Business” and select the corresponding template from the search results.

Step 3

After selecting the template, you’ll see a brief description of what the flow does and the services it connects to. Click ‘Continue’. You may need to sign in to Office 365 and OneDrive for Business if you haven’t already.

Recommended reading: Power Automate Functions Overview

Step 4

After the template loads, you can configure the specifics of the flow. For example, you can specify a folder in OneDrive where the attachments will be saved.

In the “On new email” box, you can set up additional filters if you wish, such as limiting the flow to certain types of emails or emails from specific senders.

Recommended reading: How to Use Power Automate Filter Query

In the “Apply to each” box, the flow is set to cycle through each attachment in an email. You shouldn’t need to modify anything here.
In the “Create file” box, you specify the location in OneDrive where you want the attachments to be saved. You can also modify the file name if you wish.

Step 5

Once you’ve finished setting up the flow, click ‘Save’ in the bottom right corner. You can now test the flow by sending an email with an attachment to your Office 365 email account. After a few moments, the attachment appears in the specified OneDrive folder.

2. Templates for data collection

Step 1. Log into Power Automate

Sign in to your Power Automate account. You can create one on the official Microsoft Power Automate website if you don’t have one. Please note that some functionalities of Power Automate may require a paid subscription.

Step 2. Navigate to Templates

Once you are on the main dashboard, navigate to the “Templates” option in the left-hand menu.

Step 3: Search for a Suitable Template

Use the search bar on the templates page to find a template that fits your data collection needs. You can use keywords related to data collection like “forms”, “surveys”, “data gathering”, etc.

Step 4: Select the Template

Click on the template that suits your requirements. For example, I’ll use this template “Notify a team When a new Forms Response is Submitted”.

Step 5

After selecting your template, you need to give your flow a name and click the continue button.

Step 6

In the next step, you need to Set Up your Flow by selecting your desired “ID of the form”, “Team to Notify,” and “Channel to notify,” then click on the Create Flow button.

Step 7

Now, your Data Collection Template Flow is ready to edit.

Step 8

Now you need to click on the edit button to edit your desired flow according to your needs.

Step 9

In editing mood, add a new step by clicking on the plus button and adding the Microsoft form section. Select your desired form id and response id.

Step 10

Add a parallel branch, and in the branch parallel section, you need to add two more rows; create a task row and Add a new row from the given options and save your flow.

Now that’s it. Your flow is ready to go.

3. Templates for productivity

Creating Power Automate Templates can significantly improve productivity by automating repetitive tasks in a standardized way. Templates offer a predefined workflow structure that can be reused for similar operations. Let’s go through a step-by-step process to design Power Automate Templates.

1. Login to Power Automate

Visit the Microsoft Power Automate website and log in using your Microsoft 365 credentials. Once logged in, you’ll see the homepage of Power Automate.

2. Create a new flow

Click on “+ Create” on the left navigation bar, then select the type of flow you want to create. For this example, we’ll create an “Automated cloud flow”.

3. Set the trigger

Name your flow and select the trigger. The trigger is the event that will start the flow. For instance, you might choose “When a new email arrives” in your Outlook or “When a new row is added” to a SharePoint list. Search for the trigger in the search bar and click on it to select it.

4. Define the steps

Now, you can add actions that will happen when the trigger is activated. For instance, you might choose to “Send an email” or “Update a row in a SharePoint list”. Click on “+ New step”, search for the action you want, and click on it to select it. You can add as many actions as you need, and you can also add conditions to execute actions only under specific circumstances.

5. Configure the actions

You’ll need to configure the details for each action. For instance, if you’re sending an email, you must specify the recipient, subject, and body. Some actions may require additional configuration, like connections to specific services.

6. Test the flow

Once you’ve set up all your actions, you can test the flow to ensure it works as expected. Click on the “Test” button at the top-right corner, and follow the prompts to test the flow.

7. Save the flow as a template

If your flow is working as expected, you can save it as a template to reuse it in the future. Go to the “Flow details” page, click on the “…” (More) button, and select “Save as template”. Give your template a name and a description, and click “Save”.

Congratulations! You have now created a Power Automate template that can be used to automate repetitive tasks and increase productivity. Note that the specific steps may vary depending on the type of flow you’re creating and the services you’re integrating with.

4.Templates for social media

Creating Power Automate Templates for Social Media can help you automate repetitive tasks related to social media management, such as posting updates or monitoring mentions of your brand. Here is a simple and easy step-by-step process to design such templates:

1. Login to Power Automate

Visit the Microsoft Power Automate website and sign in using your Microsoft 365 credentials.

2. Create a new flow

Click on “+ Create” on the left navigation bar, and select the type of flow you want to create. In this instance, we’ll create an “Automated cloud flow”.

3. Set the trigger

Define the event starting the flow. As an example, you can choose “When a new email arrives” in your Outlook account (perhaps you get a daily report you want to share) or “When a new row is added” to a SharePoint list (which might be your content calendar).

4. Define the steps

Here, you can add actions to take place when the trigger event occurs. For example, you can use the “Post a tweet” action from the Twitter connector or the “Create a post” action from the Facebook connector to share content on these platforms.

5. Configure the actions

Specify the details for each action. For a Twitter post, you’ll need to specify the tweet text and any images or links to include. For a Facebook post, you’ll need to specify the post content and the page where it will be published.

6. Test the flow

After setting up your actions, test the flow to ensure it operates as expected. Click the “Test” button at the top-right corner and follow the instructions to test your flow.

7. Save the flow as a template

If the flow functions as planned, you can save it as a template for future use. Navigate to the “Flow details” page, click on the “…” (More) button, and select “Save as template”. Provide a name and description for your template, then click “Save”.

Congratulations, you’ve created a Power Automate template for automating social media tasks. This template can be reused and customized as needed to manage various social media activities.

Further reading: Power Automate or Logic Apps

Creating your own Power Automate template step-by-step

Step 1: Navigate to ‘My Flows’

Click ‘My Flows’ from the main dashboard on the left-hand navigation bar.

Step 2: Create a New Flow

Click “+ New Flow” and select “Automated” from the blank”. This will allow you to create a new custom flow from scratch.

Step 3: Set Up Your Trigger

A panel will open, asking you to choose your flow’s trigger. A trigger is an event that starts your flow. For instance, it could be when a new email arrives, when a new item is created in SharePoint or many other options. Search for the trigger you want and then click on it.

Step 4: Configure Your Trigger

Depending on the trigger you selected, you may need to configure it. This might include selecting a specific email account, SharePoint site, etc.

Step 5: Add an Action

After setting up your trigger, click “New step” and “Add an action”. This will allow you to choose your flow’s action when the trigger event occurs. Actions could be sending an email, creating an item in SharePoint, etc.

Step 6: Configure Your Action

Just like the trigger, you might need to configure your action. This might include specifying the email’s content, choosing the SharePoint list, etc.

Step 7: Add More Actions or Conditions (Optional)

If you want your flow to do more than one action or only do an action under certain conditions, you can add more actions or add conditions. You can do this by clicking on “New step” and then either “Add an action” or “Add a condition”.

Step 8: Save Your Flow

After setting up your flow, click on the “Save” button in the top right corner.

Step 9: Test Your Flow

Use the ‘Test’ button in the top-right corner to ensure your flow works as expected. You may need to manually trigger the flow or perform the trigger action (like emailing yourself).

Step 10: Share Your Flow as a Template (Optional)

If you want to share your flow as a template with others, you can submit it as a template to Microsoft. You can do this by going to ‘My Flows’, clicking on the ‘…’ next to your flow, and then clicking on the “Detail” option, and you can redirect to this page here you can see this option ‘Submit as template’.

You might also like: Power Automate’s formatdatetime: Your Ultimate Guide

Conclusion

Power Automate templates provide a potent tool in the Microsoft 365 suite for boosting productivity, streamlining workflows, and simplifying data collection. They offer pre-designed solutions ranging from Power Automate desktop templates for automating desktop processes to Power Automate email and flow templates that manage communication and task sequencing. By utilizing Power Automate for Business Templates, businesses can leverage the best power automate templates to reshape their operations and gain competitive advantages.

The breadth of these templates, from those optimized for social media to those geared toward data collection, ensures that there are solutions for various tasks. With illustrative Power Automate Template examples available, users can effortlessly adapt templates to their unique needs, further solidifying Power Automate’s value proposition. Whether you’re searching for efficiency, innovation, or transformation, Power Automate templates hold the key to unlocking a new level of workplace productivity.

If you want to dive deeper into the Power Automate universe, an effective learning course will be effective. Take a look at the course Power Automate Training: Learn to Automate Your Business Processes created by highly experienced professionals, where happily they share accumulated knowledge with you.

FAQ

What are Power Automate templates?

Power Automate templates are pre-built workflows designed for Microsoft Power Automate, a cloud-based service that allows businesses to create and enforce automated workflows across multiple applications and services. These templates include different actions, conditions, and triggers to automate tasks and processes. They help to reduce the need for manual intervention and cover various domains, such as Microsoft 365, power automated desktop templates, email templates, flow templates, business templates, productivity templates, social media templates, data collection templates, and more.

How to use Power Automate templates?

You must first log in to your Power Automate account to use Power Automate templates. From the home page, select "Templates" from the left navigation pane. This will open a page with a variety of predefined templates. Choose a template that suits your requirements, click on it, and then select "Use this template". After that, you may need to sign in to or create connections for any services the template uses. Once the connections are configured, review the flow and modify any triggers or actions as necessary. Finally, click "Save" to start using the flow.

Where to find Power Automate templates?

Power Automate templates can be found in the Power Automate portal. After logging in, select "Templates" from the left navigation pane. This will display a wide range of templates. You can also use the search bar at the top of the page to search for specific templates using keywords, such as "Power Automate Templates 150", "Microsoft 365", or "Power Automate Business Templates".

How to create a Power Automate template?

Creating a Power Automate template involves designing a flow and saving it as a template. After logging into Power Automate, click on "+ Create" and select the type of flow you wish to create (e.g., Automated, Instant, Scheduled, or Desktop flow). Define the trigger that will initiate the flow, and add any actions you want the flow to carry out. Once you're satisfied with your flow, you can save it as a template. Go to the flow's details page, click the "..." button, select "Save as template", and provide a name and description for your template.

What are some examples of Power Automate templates?

Power Automate offers a wide range of templates designed for various use cases. Some examples include:

Power Automate Email Templates: For instance, you might have a template that sends an automatic reply whenever you receive an email from a specific person.
Power Automate Productivity Templates: Such templates can automate tasks like creating tasks in Microsoft To Do based on flagged emails in Outlook.
Power Automate Templates for Social Media: These can automate tasks like posting updates on your social media platforms whenever a new blog post is published.
Power Automate Templates for Data Collection: An example would be a template that collects Twitter posts with a specific hashtag and stores them in an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

These templates can help streamline various tasks and processes in a business environment, significantly improving productivity.

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Power Automate Templates: How to Simplify Your Workflow

Understanding Power Automate templates

How to use Power Automate templates