Microsoft Power Automate Approval Workflow With Excel Online

what up full fans it's me John I'm back with another video today gonna talk about some new updates that came out want to make a video about it really excited about it so I don't know if you saw but let's go check out the blog post really quick so here you can see browse the history of your approvals and other updates and so the big announcement here was approvals history right everybody's asking for that but we'll go look at that at the end really quickly this video I want to focus on these brand new Excel online connectors so I get questions all the time from people about the Excel connector why don't you use the Excel connector more John one season so the old version there was this weird limitation where if you had the sheet open the flow couldn't access it and the flows would fail or if the flow was using it someone else couldn't use it and so just it was kind of clunky well these new ones came out and they don't walk the sheet and other people can't interact with the sheet while the flow interacts with the sheet as well and and so I have been getting by far my biggest request for the Excel connector is when people say John we want to do approvals with Excel and so previously it wasn't really possible it wasn't even something I wanted to try and but now with these new ones I actually sat down and I built the flow that does approvals with Excel and so this one goes out to my buddy seis are on YouTube because this one's for you buddy you asked for it I got it for you so alright let's jump in follow my screen and let's work through this together so first thing we need to look at is the Excel she set up so I have two tables here okay I have one you can see it's a simple approval first name last name email address and it's about webinars you can have links to slides and then there's a couple fields over here which you would need to do a little bit of user education on but for the purposes of this demo I'll let you work that out afterwards okay so now we can see over here there's a separate tab a separate table and that's approved and all it is is just mirroring the first table right so okay let's go and check out the flow itself and so here we are and you can see approval on Excel for say sorry I'm not gonna try as last name cuz I'll just butcher it so let's see first thing to know when working with Excel connector you need to always have a trigger for it and because it doesn't have triggers of its own so I'm starting with recurrence which is scheduled and then you can see I've set it here for every one hour and then what I did was I went and I decided to use the get a row action get a row using a key column right and so you can see I've set it up to onedrive for business onedrive then my flow demos folder and then uh the sample sheet that I just showed you over here now I'm connecting to Table one and what I'm looking for is this key column send for approval and the value I need is yes and so right here send for approval we'll have to say yes and then that's gonna kick off the rest of the flow and so then we'll see that there's a condition here that checks if send for approval is equal to yes and if so it starts at approval and so we can see then I bring in the modern approvals experience to work with the excel sheet and so then I have a second condition here I'll let you look at this really quick you can see how I've set it up my approval type is that anyone can approve I just give it a test approval as the title assigned it to myself put some some details in here and then don't have a link to anything because I dropped all the details into the approval itself so now the condition the next one is what's the response of the approval the response is equal to approve then we'll take some actions what we'll do is we'll add a row into a table so we'll take the data from over here in the proposals table and we'll move it over here to the approved table and so they're they're labeled a little bit differently like you can see this one's Table thirteen and this one's Table one I have the different names but you can figure out pretty quickly which one is which so you can see that what I do is I take all the dynamic content from the first table and I put it over here into the second table if it's approved and then what I do is I send an email to the user saying congratulations your webinar is approved and then naturally you know you'd make a big email with some details giving them some information maybe you create a calendar event and insert it in there but for this we just can keep it simple so we can keep it short so then I say if the response is not equal to approve then go ahead and send an email to the person saying sorry it was rejected with the comments of why and then at the bottom what we do here is we we delete a row and so we we use the same exact criteria that we had did to get a row same exact you can see here table once and for pool yes same exact details so that way after the approval runs the data moves over emails are sent then the item is deleted from the first row so that in the next hour after that flow has already run through it doesn't check it again and then so that someone doesn't have to go and delete it automatically from from the list from the sheet itself so okay let's go now to the sheet and I'm going to dump some data in here and let's actually see it work okay so I went ahead and I entered all of my items in I'm gonna go over my flow I forgot to click update but that's okay I'm gonna go ahead and click run now because I don't want to wait for one hour and so I want to run it right this minute and I want to start the approval on that item okay cool we can see this recurrence started it gets the row hits the condition the condition is running obviously it's met because it went to yes starts the approval I'm waiting for an email any moment now there it is test approval named John Levesque best webinar ever webinar description it will be magical and amaze you proposed date looks like it needs a little bit of formatting but let's go ahead and approve it takes us to the flow approval center where we can see our received requests our sent requests and now our history oh look at that beautiful beautiful you can see received yes he sent you can see that the approval went through condition met row deleted go over to our spreadsheet the proposed item is gone the approved item is magically there I have an email congratulations lots of awesome details about the webinar it's approved boom awesome flow approvals modern approval experience using the new excel connector I hope this is useful to you guys let me know if you have comments let me know how you guys are gonna use this and also please feel free to suggest the next video idea alright I'll talk to you guys soon good as always later

Channel: Jon Levesque

Views: 47,340

Rating: 4.9225183 out of 5

Keywords: flow, microsoft flow, excel, excel online, sharepoint workflow designer, office 365, approval process, how to do quick approvals, document approvals, how-to, how to, excelonline, powerapps, microsoft flow approval workflow, microsoft flow excel, microsoft flow tutorial, microsoft flow examples, microsoft excel, jon levesque, jon levesque microsoft, ms flow, learn excel, excel flow

Id: fnntHY5YCpY

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018