How to Setup a Holiday Approval Flow with MS Forms, Planner & Flow | Microsoft 365

hi my name is nick and today i'm going to show you guys how you can create a microsoft form and with the data that you captured there send it into microsoft planner and which will then integrate into your microsoft outlook calendar and this is incredibly useful if you're going to create a form for let's say holiday requests and put that into an approval flow and capture all that information into something like microsoft planner and then obviously see all of your holidays um from various different colleagues around the business inside your microsoft outlook calendar so incredibly useful from those kind of functionality and guys if you find this useful then definitely do go ahead and click the like button and consider subscribing to the channel it really means a lot and i'll keep you informed of all the other updates uh videos that we have going on on the channel and with that said let's jump on over to the desktop and i'll roll you through just how to do this okay so the first thing we want to do is just head over to office.com from office.com we're going to need to load up a couple of different applications so the first thing we're going to do is check down this app bar just here and see if we can locate microsoft power automate um if not we can click on the more options at the top here in expand and what we want is power automate forms and planner these are the three that we're going to start with okay so i'm going to just right click on power automate open that in a new tab that's going to take me to power automate i'm going to hook back over to office here office.com right click on forms open forms and then i'm going to come back again and right click on planner and open um planner in a new tab as well so the first thing that we're going to want to do is actually go to microsoft forms and we're going to think the first thing that we need to do is create that form to capture those holiday requests so i'm going to click on new form and i'm going to just call this uh holiday request okay and click add new and first thing i'm going to do is call it a text field and i want the first name okay and then i'll make sure that's required i'm going to click on another free text field here and i'm going to call this last name okay and that's obviously required as well i'll then go ahead and add another um option this time i'm going to go with a date and i'm going to call this one um start date and it's obviously required i'm going ahead and add another date field and this time it'll be end date okay and it's obviously required so we have a series of four questions the first name the last name when you want your holiday to start and when you want your holiday to end okay uh most people that would be never but um okay very simple form and we can just preview what this looks like just here okay pretty straightforward so now we have a form and that we can use to capture data and it takes a matter of moments to set that up now the first name and last name are not necessarily required um but i like to have them as a safeguard just in case something goes wrong with the email address and what i mean by that is if you click on the ellipses over on the top right hand corner and go down to settings here you want to make sure you can record their name which records the email address of the person who filled in the form right um if you don't have that ticked you won't capture the information and so it's always good to have the fail safe for the first and last names as well if you wanted to look them up separately and obviously i'm going to have that ticked in this example and the next thing we want to do is actually go ahead and click on share and copy the link okay so we want to be able to share this form data don't we so we're going to copy that link then what i'm going to do is i'm going to hop over to um microsoft teams very quickly here what i'm going to do is i'm going to go over to that office guys general channel and i'm going to hit the little plus button to create a tab for my holiday forum i'm going to click on a website and i'm going to call this holiday request okay and then i'm going to paste that url into there i'm going to remove that and just click on save that now adds the holiday request form directly here i can go ahead and just log into the form using that and now i can populate it right so here within my holiday request i have a standard form i'll go ahead and just type this in and just add myself some holiday requests and so i'm going to start this holiday request today on sunday the 6th i'm going to run it until let's say monday the 7th okay i'm going to submit it and obviously now that's been submitted so i can do is minimize microsoft teams again and we can see here from the responses you can see exactly what's just happened i've just responded we're starting on the 6th until the 7th okay so that data now exists in the ecosystem which is fantastic so we can know we know it works now obviously you can have loads of different ways you can customize this even further i'm going to keep it really basic because it says the basic capture form the next thing that we want to do is actually then head over to power automate from power automate what we want to do is go ahead and create a new flow and from here we want it to be an automated flow okay and we're going to call this holiday requests and then what i'll do is the first option actually is quite fortunate enough is when a new response is submitted if you don't see that you can go ahead here and just type um form and basically it's when a new response is submitted that's the one that we want we're going to click that and then we're going to click create this creates our basically a start of our flow which is fantastic so we're gonna do um is it's gonna ask for the form id so we're gonna choose a form from our drop-down list and i have a couple which is unfortunate so i'm gonna go with um probably should be that one there and we'll check that's working in a moment if not i'm gonna have to change that and the next option that we have here is the next step so we want a new step and this time we want um to type it in form and we want to get response details okay so we want to get all of the details about the submission so to do that we're going to come in here we're going to choose the holiday request form which is the same as this one and we're going to choose the id from the dynamic field here that represents the um submission okay so we're going to click that so now this step is going to get all the details about what's been submitted okay so the next thing that we need to do now is um basically create a bit of an approval flow right so we need to know who submitted the data and um who to send it to so if for example i have an employee working for me then you know when they submit their holiday request i need to approve that holiday request so i'm going to do is i'm going to click on new step i'm going to type approve um and straight away we can see that we can create an approval so i'm going to head and click on start and wait for an approval okay so i'm going to click on that um and this is going to be here so basically the first to respond which will be fine and then we're going to give this a title so straight away we have access now to a lot of dynamic content here and that basically symbolizes uh all of the information that was inside the form so we have the first name the last name the start date the end date and their email address so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just put in the first name here i'm going to put a dash and just say holiday request obviously if you wanted to you could um in fact just put a space there and put the last name as well um here say first name last name and then holiday request okay now we have the assigned to so i want to sign this to myself um or if i wanted to i could go ahead and come up and add an additional step just after this and and i can do is i can call it manager right i can get the manager's details from 365 based on the email address of the person who's submitted so i'm going to go to that email address there which is the person who submitted it and this will then go ahead and get the manager email address for um for our approval flow right so i can assign this approval to the manager right so i can go ahead and find their email address in this list um and i think [Music] see here one second um but i think it's gonna be the mail okay with that one so we can now go ahead and basically email it um directly to that person i'm also just going to add myself in here as well and just to make sure that it does come across i'm going to go with nick at that office guy which is fantastic so it's now going to be mailed to the manager it's going to be also being mailed to me and the first one of us to approve this holiday request will then obviously proceed to the next steps now this is not necessarily going to work for you guys if office 365 has not been set up correctly and so you know we need to know obviously who reports to whom in order for this step to work um i have other examples where i actually use an excel document and then i find the email address of the person who responded here inside an excel lookup sheet and tells me who's who that person reports to and then i use that email address of the manager that was in that way and so you can skip this step altogether if you wanted to um or you could have a holiday request form specifically for your own employees and then just put your yourself here as well and so the next thing here is you can add details uh so here we could put if we skip down here we can just go to the get response details sections and we can just say you know it's the first person we'll go down a line uh last name and we can then go down another line and just say the start date is there the end date is there and if you wanted to in your form you could add a whole notes section and add notes in as well we can add links and there's a whole host of additional items as well but i'm going to leave this pretty open as it is without um you know messing around with the advanced settings keep it quite basic to start with okay so so far we've had a submission we've gotten the details about the submission we've got the manager of the person who submitted the form and then we've gone ahead and created an approval flow that will then send an approval request to the manager of the person who submitted the form okay so now after this point here what we want to do is we want to check a couple of things um we want to be able to um first of all click on the ellipses here and we want to configure a run after and so if get manager v2 fails we still want to be able to continue the process flow okay and so we want to tick that as well and i'm going to click done that way it won't fail um the the whole entire uh request holiday request as a flow so i'm going to leave that as that is and then i'm going to add another step this time we need a condition and the condition is going to basically give us the outcome of this approval okay so i'm going to come here and as you see from the dynamic content we now have the start and wait for approval and what we want is the outcome okay so we're going to click outcome and put that into the conditions we're then going to go ahead and say it's equal to and then we're going to type approve okay so if it is approved we then want to do something with it and if it's rejected we also want to do something with it okay um so let's start with the um has been approved side of things the first thing that we can do here is probably send an email to the person who submitted the holiday request right so we're going to go email and we're going to go ahead and find the send email v2 and we're going to give that a click we're then going to use dynamic content in our email field and we're going to basically go to the responders email address the very first action if you will i'm going to click that okay so then we're going to give this a subject we're going to say holiday approved okay and if we wanted to we can add more dynamic content or uh further details into this section here for the body of the email so i'm just going to go ahead and find what was actually submitted and we're just going to go with a first name last name i'm going to say your holiday started him and ends here okay so we have that dynamic content and if you wanted to we can do a lot more with it i'm just going to for this example keep it straight forward and just move on to the next step so it's been approved we send the email the next thing we want to do is create a task for microsoft planner so here i'm going to type planner and i'm going to find the creator task button i'm going to give that a click and what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and find the um that office guy team i'm going to find the plan that sits inside that team which is a test list and then i'm going to give this a title and i'm going to go with some dynamic content to start with i'm going to go with the first name i'm here and i'm gonna go dash holiday okay so we can now know that person's on holiday and it's inside planner we're gonna put this into the bucket i only have one bucket in my test list which is to do but you might have a whole bucket dedicated to holidays or a whole plan dedicated to holidays if you wanted to now the start date and the end date i usually have trouble with these is the dynamic content doesn't exist right so what we need to do is first of all actually add a step above the um create task and what we're going to do is here is we're going to add something called a compost so we're going to go compose i'm going to click that and then in that input we're going to grab our start date from the get response details we're going to get the start date okay then we're going to add another one just below there and we're going to type compose again okay and we'll give that click and this time we're going to add the end date okay from the response detail section the end date now i can quickly quickly rename these so we know what they are we're going to say this is the start date okay and we're going to rename this one as well and this is the end date okay so we're going to keep that pretty simple and obviously i'm moving at quite a fast pace here guys because i'm going to imagine that if you're you're going to be relatively familiar with how this stuff works but do slow down or rewind the video at any point if you need to i wanted to just make sure that this was out there um and you know i think it's pretty easy to do but do just you know fast forward rewatch as you need to and slow it down and pause it if you need to as well okay so we have a start date and end date now now we can use those inside of our task right so now i come into the start date and here we go we have the output for um end date and we need the output for the start date so our start date here time is the um output of the start date here and our due date is going to be our output of the end date okay so now we have those two in here we can now obviously assign this to people as well if we wanted to but because it's a holiday i'm not going to do that i'm just going to leave that as is now the next step we want to do is go ahead and update those task details so i'm going to click planner again and this time what we want to do is we want to find the update task detail section just at the bottom here we give that a click and this time we're going to have a task id now the task id is the task that we just created so we're going to click in here and we're going to enter a custom value the custom value activates the dynamic content on the right hand side and what we want to do is find the the subsection here that says um create a task we're going to scroll down until we find the id of the task that we just created and we're going to put that into there okay so that keeps it pretty moving pretty fluid now um if we move on to the next step we have this description now the description is where we can add in all the details of the holiday request so if we scroll down we can go and find all of the response details again okay so we get the first name i can press enter and i'll go to the last name i'll come back down here and go the start date is there and the end date is there right so all of the details um and then you can obviously write whatever you want in here and you can make it uh you know sound a lot better than i am just doing this but um it gives you an idea what you can do you can also attach documents if you want to as well okay so um in summary then we've sent an email on the approval we've obviously got those dynamic contents of the start and end date we've created the task we've updated the details of the task um and everything in there is good so that puts an end i guess to our approved section now on the uh rejected sign so if the holiday request is rejected we can go ahead and send an email um to them basically saying sorry it's been rejected right um so we're going to go find the send email v2 so we're going to do that again we're going to choose from the dynamic content let's scroll over here a little bit and we're going to find the responders email and we're going to add that into here as well now the subject will be holiday um rejected and you can say whatever you want and then we can also put the details in here um for what has been rejected right so we come down to the response details and we'll just say okay the first name of the person the last name of the person the start date of the of the holiday request and the end date and again that's pretty you know you can add whatever you need into here and also there's something called notes right so once the approval has been rejected the person who's doing the rejection or approval they have the ability to add notes and you can pull those notes into um into this section as well so something called response comments and and that's basically comments added from the basically the person who rejected and so you can go ahead and do that as well so i can drop that in and it kind of puts it into a bit of a loop for you and so i'm going to remove that because i don't want a loop and not in this example but you have the ability to do so if needed and i'll just remove the apply to each there okay so you do have that ability to add those comments in if you want um but i'm going to keep it really simple just like this so there you go so now we have a complete process flow here right so a form gets submitted we've updated the details we've got the manager of the person who filled the form in we've sent off an approval to that manager and they've either rejected or accepted right and if they accept it and approve the holiday then we're going to create a task in uh microsoft planner and we're going to make sure all the details of that are included okay so we're going to do is click save on this one okay and uh what we're going to do is go back to our form over here and actually you know fill it in right so i'll do this in microsoft teams and i can go ahead and submit another response and this time i'm going to go with nick uh regan and i'm not going to do is i'm going to put a date in here i'm going to do the same as before the sixth to the seventh and i'm going to submit it okay i'll minimize microsoft teams come back to my power ultimate flow and what i can do is just wait for this to kind of come through here and it shouldn't take a moment and so to bear with me i might just have to fast forward a little bit in order to get this going um and the other thing i can do is just check to make sure that i'm using obviously the correct holiday um calendar uh sorry the correct form id because i had two holidays i've gone for this one and but it might not be in the correct one to use so obviously i can go in here and i can pick the code and by peeking the code i can see the form id right so this is the id of the form and i'm actually looking for if i come here go to share and we can have a look at the id it ends in for you so mss4u come back here we can see that this is not the correct form right so uh what i can do is i can come here and change it to this one and come here and peak the code again and just see if this is the right one so this is the correct form so i'm going to click done on there i'm going to come here and i'm also going to just make sure that this is the correct one as well and i'm going to pick the code here see the form id is ms4u and this might not be a problem that you have it's just that i have multiple forms with the same name i'm going to click that save and then what i'm going to do is go back to microsoft teams again and submit a third response and so this time it should go through to our power automate flow and we're going to go for the sixth and the seventh and then we're gonna submit so now that's been submitted i'll go ahead and come back to our flow i'll come back here and now we can see that we actually have one running so we go ahead and click on that and we can see what's happening within our flow so we've a form has been submitted we've got the details of it we've got the manager of the of the person which is so basically i signed myself as my own manager here using two different email addresses and so basically i've got the email address of the person um and the mail of that person right so that is fine um right so from here what we can do is then see that we are sending an approval and it's basically sent an email out it's ready to be approved now if i go into microsoft teams there's actually microsoft power automate or flow as an app right so i can come in here and i can click this and then it basically shows you all of the various different things right that are happening in microsoft power automate formally known as flow if you click on approvals this will also show you the approval request that you've been sent right so here we are right i have this um request that's been sent and i can approve it here or i can reject it okay now obviously we just noticed it's called holiday request it hasn't got a name at the front so i can go ahead and come back to um [Music] to my form data i click on edit just for a second and just see what's going on with this um this here because uh it's uh it's because right so because i changed the form up here it's changed automatically the um these titles and this dynamic data is now incorrect so what i'm going to do is remove these okay and add them back in using the correct form data and this is a really quick step so bear with me i'm just going to go ahead and basically say um the first name and the last name okay and then i can obviously do the same just down here i can go ahead and put in the first name the last name uh the start and do that in the right spot uh start date and end date down here okay and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to check to make sure that all of these are also flowing as expected and so we can see that i didn't update everything as i should have done and so i'm just going to go ahead and do that that one it should be okay and so what we're going to do is we're going to just find all of the details and we're going to get first name and we're going to get last name start date and end date okay so i'm going to pop those in we'll also do the same here we obviously need to make sure that the title is um also listed correctly so we're going to go with the first name and then holiday okay that's going to be the title uh the rest of that is should be okay we'll just check this one's not right and this one's not right so we'll just quickly update those and this is a bit of a tip i guess guys if you do come across any troubleshooting um of how to go about fixing it it's relatively straightforward and you do have to think about all the things that you might have changed on route and so when i change that form right at the top it affects everything that flows underneath her so it's not too bad to do but one to just keep in mind be mindful of and you'll make sure you update everything that you need to afterwards as well um so just come back here end date right so that's that side and then obviously we'll just make sure that our rejections also updated accordingly um and then it's the last one before we can resubmit um but unfortunately we can resubmit without actually having to go through the process of filling the form in again so um from a test point of view it's not too bad right so i'm going to click save on that and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back one and i'm going to come into all runs and then i'm going to click on cancel that one there okay because it's it's old it's not no longer needed and from here i'm just going to go ahead and reject it um just because i want it out of the system there that's done right so now it's not in our flows approval system and with it ticked i can go ahead and resubmit it i'm going to click yesterday resubmission and that's going to then flow through again so it's been submitted we've got the details we've got the manager and it's just going to go through and create that approval flow now it's going to create the email and and it's going to add it into our approval area here as well so i'm just going to click on refresh that and that should come through here in a moment so there it is right now we have the first name the last name and it's a holiday request i can click into this it's going to load up all the details here on the right hand side i can see who it is when they want and obviously i get the ability to add comments which we're talking about earlier and we can also choose to approve reject reassign etc etc right now there's a couple of options if you have the app for flow installed on your phone all of these will also be pinned straight through to your phone as a notification and you obviously have access to this in teams and also you have access to it in outlook via emails as well and you can reprove it here you can click into it and we can obviously go ahead and approve it here as well so i'm going to click approve and confirm that and haven't added any details once that's done it's gone it's out of your approval section uh it's not a problem i'm going to go back now to our outlook here the next thing that we want to do is head over to our planner app right in our planner app we have our test list plan we're going to click that and we can see that our holiday has been created here as well i can click in and we can see um i haven't added any details strangely enough but it is for the sixth and the seventh and so what i can do is just close that down for a second come back to our flow and we can see that we're still in the conditions here and it's still in the midst of um updating our task and sometimes when you do this for the first time the first one doesn't actually seem to go through very well if i were to then submit more multiple after the first it seems to update fine i imagine there's some kind of bug in uh the way that power automate is talking with um the plan for the first time but uh once the first one's out of the way the rest of it seems to flow very very efficiently and so if we go back into our test list here here you go you can see that we have this holiday request as a task inside our planner right um so the next thing that we want to do is go ahead and click on the ellipses here as the plan owner and go to add to outlook calendar from here we can publish and then copy our link okay so we're going to copy this link and then we're going to go and head over to outlook from outlook we're going to go plus our calendar and then we're going to go from internet and we're going to go ctrl v and paste that in or right click and paste clicking ok saying yes we're okay with that we have a holiday calendar okay and what we can do is right click here i think it's here i can right click i can't right click um okay so for some reason it's not letting me right click i can rename it later and that's fine so we can click on this little arrow here and it puts it into a merge mode okay so now we can see two calendars overlaying we also have our holiday um from our from our plan appearing here so we have nick holiday and if i right click it's supposed to be able to rename um but it's not letting me which is a little frustrating um but nonetheless here we are so we can have the ability now to add all of these holidays and see them all overlaid into our direct calendar which is absolutely fantastic now if we head back over to um our plan we can just close that down we don't need to use planner anymore so we can just go ahead and close planner and we can still see that our flow is run which is a little frustrating um but if we were to submit more they would flow through without any problems it's always the first one for some reason that causes an issue and but that's it guys that's a simple way of basically creating a um flow uh that basically links in form data and pulls it all the way through and so guys hopefully you found this uh useful uh if you did then go ahead and hit that like button for me and if you're new here go ahead and subscribe to the channel by subscribing you'll be kept up to date with all of the videos uh that we do here at the uh office guy and guys it's pretty simple uh to basically create a basic form have that form data um go into power automate and pull all of that data into microsoft planner and then integrate microsoft planner into outlook it keeps everything actually quite fluid uh once you get the process set up you don't actually have to do anything other than approve holidays or reject holidays and everything just seems to flow through i've been using this for about a year now this method and it works well for me and so hopefully it will work well for you guys as well um so as always i hope you have a fantastic day and i'll catch you guys in the next one

Channel: That Office Guy

Views: 124,621

Keywords: that office guy, microsoft 365, microsoft outlook, microsoft planner, microsoft flow, microsoft power automate, microsoft forms, holiday request, approval flow, office, tutorial, office 365, manager approval microsoft flow, power automate manager approval, approval manager, request, holiday, flow

Id: 1ugiG_XgLvQ

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020